GBAMusRiper (a conversion tool I made)

[Bregalad]

I made a tool in Java to rip music from Game Boy Advance games into MIDI (.mid) and Sound Font (.sf2) format. When used in combination, for example using the BASSMIDI driver, the resulting files sounds extremely close to the original song, and without emulating the Game Boy Advance in any way.

Download here : http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/881/

Just don't submit MIDIs ripped with this to VGMusic please.

[Pizzaking271]

Good! Question is, though, how do I run it with the command prompt?

[Bregalad]

There is instruction in the redame file, but as they are apparently not clear enough I made a better explaination on the Romhacking.net boards.

[Black_Wing]

Might want to add that you need to have file you are trying to convert inside the bin folder. Took a little trial and error as I haven't touched Java. Tried this with Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis and it worked like a charm.

Oh nice, perfectly ripped the voice sample from Castlevania: Circle of the Moon.

[Merit Celaire]

This is still one thing that I just don't understand... what in the heck is the purpose of the "Direct Sound 1" and "Direct Sound 2" channels. I'm still baffled because I thought those types of channels would somewhat work like Super Nintendo music channels... o_O

[Jayster]

Not completely sure of everything, but I believe the GBA mixes and process all of the samples within software and outputs it through two channels, a right and left channel, or Direct Sound 1 & 2. It doesn't have a separate channel that can play a sample at a time like the SNES. As for how many samples the software could mix and output through the direct sound at a time, I'm not sure of the limitations, but I would bet it would have to do more with the CPU usage than anything, so there would have to be a trade off between the sound and the game itself.

[Pizzaking271]

Yeah, I'm confused too! Why would Nintendo make a console that uses voice samples like a Sega Genesis?

[Bregalad]

It's basically what Jaystair said.

Instead of providing hardware to play samples like the Super Nindendo does, the Game Boy Advance's Direct channels just allows to play back a sound buffer where the program can mix whatever it wants. You can think of it being like on a PC - you send a few samples for a short amount of time and the hardware play it, but you need to send something again when it has completed playing.

The only limitation then becomes the CPU itself - and unfortunately in the GBA's case the CPU is not very powerful therefore the number of simultaneously playing samples and the quality of re-sampling are usually mediocre.

The sappy sound engine, which is what most games used and what the ripper can rip allows games to select from 4 to 12 sound "channels" which works similarly to Super Nintendo's channels. However, if a game chooses 12 channels, the music engine can take a lot of time to complete, while if it chooses 4 channels, it is guaranteed the music engine will be reasonably fast.
Also the sampling rate is selectable, and most games selected a low sample rate to avoid lagging.

When music is played after being ripped by GBAMusRiper, it is played entirely by MIDI - no GBA is being emulated - therefore there is no limitations in sample rate and number of simultaneously playing channels (or I'd say those are limited to your PC instead of your GBA - which is thousands of times less limited).

[jhonsmith]

Hello dear...
i think its might want to add that you need to have file you are trying to convert inside the bin folder. Took a little trial and error as I haven't touched Java. Tried this with Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis and it worked like a charm...!!!

[Darkmind]

I just got a look at this, pity that the pokemon games don't seem to work, even though I'm almost sure they're Sappy sound engine format. Good stuff nonetheless! If you can find a way to support Pokemon, I could work on a soundfont for it.

[Blitz Lunar]

Just don't submit MIDIs ripped with this to VGMusic please.

Don't worry, I'm sure people will
To make it easier on us though, consider adding some kind of "converted by GBAMusRiper" text into the tracknames of midis made with it (that is if you haven't already, haven't used it myself yet.) Might be a wise idea to do this for other purposes as well, quite what I dunno. Just a thought.

[Bregalad]

Well it sucks if people use my tool for this purpose, hopefully nobody will.
Anyway it could be easily detected. I output MIDI format 0 which is quite rare, most sequencers record in format 1. The reason I used format-0 is that it is simpler to output such a MIDI in binary (only a single track to deal with, all events in it).
So if you see MIDIs with plafrom = GBA, Delta-time value = 24 and midi format 0, chances are they were converted with GBAMusRiper.

Anyways, all these things can be edited out... I mean it's not hard to convert from format 0 to format 1 (most sequencers do it by default), as it is easy to remove a "converted by ..." message. But some people are so dumb they don't even remove this and submit MIDIs here.