HOW TO: rip music, sound effects, or movies from PS1 & PS2 games

Post the file structure here, either take a screenshot of the disc's contents or write them down.
Also, what error messages did you get? MPEG2 flag errors? Buffer stuff?

It's a lot harder to figure out what the problem is when we have next to no information.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Rew

(You sound annoyed.)

Nah, I was not. It was just the complete absence of emoticons that made it seem that way.
Peace to you.
(no one uses that shit, they have my sympathies)

Originally Posted by Rew

Now I'm trying to move on to other sound file types and am running into other issues. Basically, in the Mega Man X Collection for PS2, all of the games in the collection, as well as the launcher and other things, are subdivided by folder. In the folder for each game and the launcher is a folder for sound (sometimes abbreviated "SND"), with two of the following files: "X_BGM.BIN" and "X_SE.BIN"--in other words the background music and sound effects for that game. I want to open the .BIN files for the BGM. I could go into great detail on all the problems I've run into, but before I do that, does anyone have any recommendations for how they normally open these kinds of .BIN files?

Chances are that those are archives in which the individual instruments and sound effects are packed. It could be that the X_BGM.BIN are streamed files (also packed or renamed), and if it was developed by Capcom, it could be ADXs. In any case, use PSound for analysis.

Originally Posted by Rew

I first tried Daemon, which from what I hear is supposed to "trick" your computer into thinking the .bin file is another drive on the computer once it's mounted onto Daemon. Well, I mounted it, but nothing doing. The error message I received when I tried to open the "drive" was "Windows cannot access this disc drive." (Maybe it's because I have Vista?) Next up was PAKthis from hcs's site, but I couldn't even get the thing to install. (I double-clicked the .exe file, and something came up for a split-second then disappeared. That was it.)

Then I turned to MagicISO. But it couldn't do anything with the .bin. I tried extracting it, but all that did was to put the file in another place on my computer, but it was still an unusable .bin file. My attempts at actually opening the .bin file was met with an error message that said, "Can't find the file or file isn't CD image file!"

So either I'm using the programs wrong or I'm using the wrong programs. I'll provide more detail or even screenshots if needed, but I guess what I'm wondering is how some of you go about opening such files when you encounter them? (Note: There were no .cue files on the X Collection disc that I could see.) Thanks.

You're using the wrong programs. As suggested above, the BIN files are no ISOs but rather archives, so a virtual drive will not help you there, because it can't read the file structure.

Mmh... Maybe you don't know: ISOs or CD/DVD images are ... Wikipedia can explain that better.
BIN is a file extension commonly used for a lot of different purpose, among them, also disk images. But you will of course not find any disk images on your disc - that would be...a disc on a disc, thus redundant. I hope you understand the explanation, as it's not very easy to make it clear to non-technophiles.

Bottom line: Use PSound. My guess is you'll find instruments.
If you want to see if music is streamed (e.g. MP3) or sequenced (e.g. MIDI), open the disc drive of your console while the game plays the song. If it's sequenced, the music will keep playing. If it's streamed (or an FMV) the music will stop and you'll probably see a message to put the disc back in (that's because streamed data is steadily read from the disc).

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Rew

EDIT: Actually, I found out bitrate was the problem. So I adjusted the bitrate in PSound, and now it's playing at the right speed. However, it still sounds like it's playing in a tin can. So to resolve that, I opened both track duplicates up in Audacity on top of each other, set one all the way to the left, the other all the way to the right. It's sounding good so far!

Copy and paste the BIN file on your harddrive. Scan this single file with CubeMediaPlayer. Check ADPCM, SS2 and ADX, though I think it's probably ADX.

Also, post a sample file. Or maybe the whole BIN.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.