Decoding .cwav files

So there's this neat PC shmup called Radio Zonde that's like the hardest thing imaginable (okay, maybe not Dai Ou Jou hard). But since I rarely play video games any more (), and this is the Behind the Music forum, let's talk about the tunage. Some of the songs are kinda neat, and I'd love to be able to hear them for more than five seconds without sound effects before biting the dust.

Cracking open the game directory, the likely suspects for music files are these tracks with .cwav extensions: stage1.cwav (which I've uploaded here as a sample), credits.cwav, boss4.cwav, etc. They're definitely not normal WAV files with an extension swap, because changing it doesn't work on both my Mac and all the players I have and Winamp Lite on this Windows lab machine I installed the game on. (Plus, there are some normal .wav files for sound effects, so it wouldn't make sense to change some but not all.) I have not tested the file extensively with Windows media players because I've never had a particularly reason to know about a great many of them, never having owned a Windows computer of my own and all.

Opening up the sound files in a trusty text editor, I found they all start with "CmpWave." Googling this header came up with a staggering three hits, all in Japanese, of course. The seemingly most useful one, http://www.hp.infoseek.co.jp/~toll/sof/ori.htm, references CWaveConv.exe and CWPlay.EXE, as well as an "AbR AdventureRunningSystem SoftwareDevelopmentKit." The link to download this kit is broken, but by directory-diving, I found one, http://download.vector.co.jp/pack/wi...SDK_040930.ZIP. This archive doesn't contain either of those executables, but since I can't read the page, I don't know if it's even supposed to. And searching Google for the executables only hits the same pages that come up with the "CmpWave" search, so I really have no idea if these programs even exist.

One of the other hits, http://www2.pf-x.net/~soft186/kako/1077539155.html, has the English phrase "Cmpwave Compress .cwav wave" in it. So maybe it's a compressed WAV file? That would certainly explain why no players have been able to open it. But I don't know with what to decompress them with.

Does anyone have any clue how to play/convert these suckers?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Think you could by any chance post a .cwav file and let some of us work on it? I can't promise anything, but I'd love to take a look at it, seeing as you have no means of finding a decompressor, or so it seems.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

There's a link in the second paragraph of the opening post. Maybe I hid it too well. =O

http://www.quiteajolt.com/gff/stage1.cwav

Thanks for offering to take a shot at it.

How ya doing, buddy?

Looks to me that AdventureRunningSystem is basically a "make your own game" kind of developement set, which used cwave format in earlier versions (but now uses Ogg Vorbis instead). Likely is that your game was made with this thing.

The latest version (dating 2004) of the SDK that you linked does not include the cwave tools so you'll need to find an older version.
The SDK itself is downloadable from http://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dl/win9.../se235667.html, but they blocked web.archive.org so you cant download older versions with that.

edit: the latest version of said SDK is up at http://buin2gou.com/advrun/. buin2gou.com is the homepage of the author of this developement set.

edit2: looking at the changelog of the SDK, it seems that the cwave tools were replaced with Ogg Vorbis at 2002.12.03. Your best bet at decoding these files is finding a version of this SDK that dates before that.

edit3: And that ain't gonna happen. archive.org has no copies of older versions of this SDK, and absolutely no sites hold any reference to it, other then the one you posted (and that one direct links to the vector.co.jp download service, so the link would be broken even if the file was there). Your best bet would be emailing the author of the SDK and hope that he understands english and still has a copy of the cwave tools.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?