Music Extracting Techniques

When I was in high school, I spent a lot of my leisure time developing tricks for ripping music from video games. Of course the most obvious way to rip music is to pause the game, adjust the music and sound fx volumes, and use AV cables to record the output.

If there are no sound adjustment options, you may be able to find an area in a level where the screen doesn’t allow you to scroll or move on until you defeat the enemies in that area; record avoiding contact with the enemies for about 4 minutes onto a VHS tape, then rip the untainted music from the VHS tape.

If neither of those options exist, you could try writing a music request letter to the big video game companies, hoping that you get some kind of response (and an emailed mp3 of the music you want from them if you’re extremely lucky).

But what if none of those work? How could you extract video game music from a cutscene that has no sound fx and music adjustment options? What kind of equipment has the power to manually extract pure background music from already-made DVDs or video game discs? Any ideas?

There’s a company in America that have been doing ‘reverse engineering’ for a few years now and can extract whatever you want as long as the original source is the master track.

Do you know the name of the company?

Here’s their website – Audio Removal, Source Separation, Dialogue Extraction (http://www.audionamix.com/)

Well, it’s a start. Thanks for the lead 🙂

As Long as it’s a windows game, I use FMV Extractor (http://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Video/Other-VIDEO-Tools/FMV-Extractor.shtml). Unless the music is in the middle of a cutscene, you can usually get the music without any extra sound effects.

As for console games, You’re kinda hit and miss, but you might be able to find what you’re looking for at Zophar’s Domain (http://www.zophar.net/utilities/rippers.html).

There’s also some Conversion Tools (http://www.zophar.net/utilities/converters.html), and Players (http://www.zophar.net/utilities/audio-players.html)

Hope This helps.