Unusual request: a voice clip rip

Specifically the trademark cackle of one Goro Majima from the Yakuza series for (mostly) the PS3 (example: https://youtu.be/LqbEY9JnORI?t=1m24s – the laugh also appears in Yakuza Ishin, Yakuza Zero and probably Yakuza 4 and 5). I’d like to use it as my Line alert but I don’t have any of the games or the know-how to rip their audio and I’m not skilled enough with audio editing programs to remove the background music/noise if I copy the audio from YouTube videos, so I decided to ask around for someone to rip it directly from the game files after getting the okay from the site mods. If anyone can help I’d love you forever.

My guess is that cutting it from an audio track of YT vid and editing it is way easier and much less time-consuming than trying to find it in VG archives. I`ve only made a really throrough rip of RgG5 but I can presume it`s similar in all later installments. My theoretical method is to get SFX.cpk, split it to individual HCAs with let`s say VGMToolBox, convert those with one of 3 (if not more) available tools (hca2wav, hcadec or relatively fresh hca.exe) and listen through all those PCM WAV files. However I don`t recall much actual sound effects in that 5th game pack, there`s mainly quotes & little BGM. So obtaining clean natively encoded copy of that thing requires much effort and desire.
Maybe you`ll find it somewhere else or record it yourself the way people ripped audio off their PS3 when it was unbreachable? BTW there should be AIX or even (mono) ADX in pre-RGG5 iterations, you can extract those with lots of PS2 utilities like Cube Media player or ADPCM Player 1.44h.
Take care!

I eventually tried this out with Ryu Ga Gotoku 5 and for some reason the se.cpk extracted into .bin files which is rather not helpful. There’s also a sound.par file that can’t be cracked with any means I’ve tried. The struggle continues…

edit: similarly unsuccessful with Yakuza 4. Darn .par files.

There might be authentic CRI tools to help you. May CPK (un)packer be included in their SDK distributed via the official site? Checking it out is worth a try…

Actually, I literally *just* figured out that I was doing something wrong. I should’ve run the se.cpk through VGMToolBox’s CRI HCA Extractor, not the CPK Extractor! I did that with Yakuza Zero and now I have a bunch of .hca files I can convert with HCA Decoder. I did one as a test which worked, it seemed to be a voice clip of a thug shouting profanities at the start of a battle. There’s hope for me finding Majima’s hyena cackle yet!… Assuming his and Kiryu’s clips are stored in the same place. But oh dear, 23,000 sound effects files and counting… I’m gonna be here checking these for quite a while.

edit: wow there’s a lot of thug clips. And lots of dupes. I’ve heard this one guy say "yare yare" like 5 times now.

I wish you the best of luck and more time to go through all those VO`s! I was just hoping you`d have like thousands of NAMED SFX files if you opened ’em correctly with a script or a dedicated tool / prog (say "majima_crackle1.hca", "majima_death2.hca", "majima_taunt3.hca", etc.) but alas… yet there`s still hope! I believe you`ll find what you`re looking for. Best wishes!

Figured out why there’s so many of these clips. The majority of them are one- or two-sentence snippets of ingame conversations. I guess when you press the button to progress the dialogue it loads a new file each time? Seems kinda inefficient but what do I know of coding. Well, back to the search. And no, they’re all named se_00001[ascending 3-digit hexidecimal value] so far.

Update: after that last revelation, had a bright idea to switch over to searching Yakuza 5’s sound files since it had around 8,000 compared to Zero’s 23,000 (much less overall voice acting in 5). Went through about half of them and only found a few files of the main cast for things like battle taunts and drinking health items (and very few instances of actual sound effects. Only the utensil-clattering, ramen-slurping, burger-wrapper-rustling and ice-shifting noises from when you take the characters to restaurants or bars). I am going to guess the clips I want aren’t kept in the "streamed" audio data and might be in that impenetrable "sound.par" file after all. But nobody on the internet seems to have a clear idea on what .par files are. Some think it’s a different name for .psarc files but others say it’s a backup archive for the repair of other files. I’ll keep searching through the remaining files but I feel like my chances are a lot lower now.

For PSARC there`re numerous unpackers used by unofficial releasers of VG DVD dumps: they extract all contents of 4+GB archives or part of ’em so that game can work from an external storage medium but I don`t think you`ll need them. Anyway you can always try to scan for contained HCAs inside those unpacked PAR or BIN files and convert them as you handled SFX from main bank. Actually this method works in most cases unless such bigfiles are somehow compressed like in dev`s own version of RAR or 7Z. I hope at least this small help is of some importance as I feel like I unneccesarily involved you into some ridiculously time-consuming work with very little chance of quick and successful ending. Maybe we`ll take future discussion in PM since only we seem to be interested?
Bye!