The rip I found, after searching in the Download Links forum, has this resonating quality to it, not unlike the quality found in badly-recorded piano videos on Youtube. Also, it's 44.1khz when GBA quality is probably not that high (I'd be surprised if it was), so the ripper obviously knew nothing about audio (if that's the case).

It would be great to hear the likes of Stilt Village and the water themes (and Arich Boss, maybe more) in a more accurate form. (Is there ever going to be an OST?) Kinda' makes me want to become a ripper.

Then again, maybe GBA's sound quality is just bad to begin with. Still, I assume there's a better method of ripping.


The GBA has one mono speaker built in, but stereo sound can be utilized via the headphones jack. Although the sound quality is much better than any portable system, it only outputs sound in 8-bit, despite the fact that the system can process sound at 16-bit. The 8-bit bottleneck prevents the GBA from achieving the highest audio quality possible, meaning that the sounds have a small amount of muffled fuzziness to them.

Only outputs at 8? Does that mean 16-bit sound rests within the games?

edit: found some more info


The Sample Rate
The GBA hardware does internally re-sample all sound output to 32.768kHz (default SOUNDBIAS setting). It'd thus not make much sense to use higher DMA/Timer rates. Best re-sampling accuracy can be gained by using DMA/Timer rates of 32.768kHz, 16.384kHz, or 8.192kHz (ie. fragments of the physical output rate).