Chrono Cross Music and Sound Investigation

[justin3009]

^-- Just so you know, every game nowadays usually has seperate sound files for instruments.  It even stays true for PSP and PS2.  Well...sometimes that is.

[FaustWolf]

Awesome dan, thanks for doing this! If you're able to document which are instruments and which are sound effects (by file range is fine, you don't have to go file-by-file necessarily), that would be extremely helpful. If you find any instrument samples that aren't included in JCE3000GT's instrument pack, we can update that.

I'll take a look at the .vab and .vag format info and see if it might provide some insight here.

[dan_death]

Awesome dan, thanks for doing this! If you're able to document which are instruments and which are sound effects (by file range is fine, you don't have to go file-by-file necessarily), that would be extremely helpful. If you find any instrument samples that aren't included in JCE3000GT's instrument pack, we can update that.

I'll take a look at the .vab and .vag format info and see if it might provide some insight here.

Might want to be careful looking up .vag.....just to let you know.

Anyways, yeah, that's what I was thinking on doing, but I'll separate them when I have the energy to.

[dan_death]

Ok, again that didn't take as long as I expected so I have separated the sound effects from the instruments. And there are a lot of sound effects, most of them are duplicates though.

[attachment deleted by admin]

[FaustWolf]

dan, your findings are a huge coup for the Chrono Community. You see, you've now confirmed a theory I've had that sounds for techs are stored alongside the visual tech data! OUT #4960, for example, is the first of three files that house everything needed for Orlha's Sisterhoods tech.

Plus, now we know where to generally look for music data. I won't get to it for quite awhile, but if someone wants to throw some of these .OUTs into a free hex editor and do some preliminary exploration of the instrument format, that would be superb.

[dan_death]

I'm glad I could help, and spend some of my free time, that I have enough of.

[cornettheory]

If you can figure out the sequencer data, volume, tempo, Pitch, of each note and make a to -> MIDI converter, I can test it out with cubase.

also there is a great freeware sampler VSTi, where one could assign presets using the sample data to apply to any of the exported midis.  I did it with sonic CD samples. This could be a way to distribute the ripped files as sources rather than mp3s or wavs.

[FaustWolf]

Interesting. Yeah, if there's some utility that can arrange sound samples, we could have entire new fan compositions and convert them into a format usable by the game engine.

[cornettheory]

this is unrelated to my previous post, but I remembered pxtone, by the guy who made cave story

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA022293/pxtone/index.html

it is a free sequencer and you can import samples

[dan_death]

Heh, didn't know megagames had PSX utilities: http://www.megagames.com/psx/psx_utils.shtml

There might be some useful things there that's not on Zophar's Domain.

[Satoh]

If you can figure out the sequencer data, volume, tempo, Pitch, of each note and make a to -> MIDI converter, I can test it out with cubase.

also there is a great freeware sampler VSTi, where one could assign presets using the sample data to apply to any of the exported midis.  I did it with sonic CD samples. This could be a way to distribute the ripped files as sources rather than mp3s or wavs.

Amazing, I'm not the first one to think of this... It would be excellent if we could somehow make a PSX>Midi Midi>PSX conversion.

There are a few mixes I'd like to see in DBT...

[dan_death]

 

Am I supposed to be doing all that?

[FaustWolf]

Haha, only if you REALLY want to. We still need to document the sound / instrument sample format first, and under normal circumstances the documenter would be me, but I won't get around to it for awhile.

[halkun]

The samples should be in APCM format. That's what the SPU took.

[FaustWolf]

Wooow, so does the SPU actually force the use of APCM in every game? And does that stand for Adaptive Pulse Code Modulation?

For my own reference and anyone else who's interested, a short wikipedia primer on Pulse Code Modulation. Also, the Bible that halkun wrote has a wealth of knowledge on the SPU that Chrono Cross needs to interact with.