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The PS1 version of Sarge’s Heroes 2 has the same low audio quality as the PS1 version of the first game (Thread 87869), but the PS2 version picks up the slack and offers the same compositions at a much higher 48kHz sample rate. Extracting this music was much simpler than I thought it would be. If you have your own copy of the game or an ISO to browse through, simply navigate to the MUSIC directory and extract all the *.SSN files. Rename these files to *.SND and you have a format that can be read by current versions of vgmstream and decoded by test. The only drawback is that vgmstream will attempt to loop the music where it should only play once (most of the tracks include their own fade-outs), but this can be avoided by turning on vgmstream’s "ignore looping" setting.
I also ran into a big "WTF" moment which I summed up best on another board, so here’s a quote box:
So there I was, digging through the data of the PS2 version of Army Men: Sarge’s Heroes 2 looking for music to fulfill a request on another forum. I found it easily enough and, thankfully, didn’t have to jump through many hoops to get it working. They were just renamed SND files, though not of the type that Windows Media Player or anything else but vgmstream could recognize. test.exe decoded them fine (though it didn’t catch the endpoints) and identified the headers as those found in a Might & Magic game.
Interesting part starts here: As I double checked the converted files, there was one song that stuck out at me. It was a much longer song, 5:16 in length, and with much better production values than the rest of the soundtrack. It even had vocals; a trio or a quartet singing some nice soulsy, easy-listening lyrics. It’s bugging me bad, so I take a 30-second clip and upload it to audiotag.info for identification.
The result? "Soul Food to Go (Sina)" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbDYmMyKxoc), a 1987 song by the pop/jazz-fusion group The Manhattan Transfer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manhattan_Transfer). I can’t find any evidence that this song plays in-game or that it’s even supposed to be on the game disc. A google search for "sarge’s heroes manhattan transfer" turns up nothing, and some quick shuffling through Youtube videos for the game also turn up nothing. Easter egg? Non-utilized content? Some dweeb left his album rip on the game’s gold disc?
So yeah, there’s a song from a 70s vocal group just sitting on the game disc. If you’ve played the game and can remember any point where that song plays, please let me know.
The files are unordered and untagged, but they retain their original 8.3 DOS-compatible filenames. An index (http://www.pastie.org/1736817) left on the disc in the music directory shows their original names.
John Baker, Barry Blum, Brian Min
with The Manhattan Transfer
Army Men:
Sarge’s Heroes 2
FLAC or MP3 (from original PlayStation 2 streams)
FLAC (http://anonym.to/?https://mega.co.nz/%23%21VUxB2CaC!HUK9Oh4athraHoXP9dLfhylFRhYk0jhTCV7 tTwusTlE)
MP3 (http://anonym.to/?https://mega.co.nz/%23%21gJoRHLrb!Yjw8nYvnHLtgbGU5mSTZiu5tFHMwmRMtqmU dR4j2qbg)