Game Music Conversions by Berserker79

Introduction to
Game Music Conversions :)
by Berserker79

Welcome to this new area of my homepage that is dedicated mostly to the music from computer games. :) Believe it or not, one of the elements that marks a game as interesting or not interesting to me is its music background. Especially music can enhance my liking the game and thus the number of hours I'm willing to spend in front of the pc playing it.
So if I find the soundtrack of a certain game interesting I try to retrieve the music files from this game. Sometimes such a process is very easy and sometimes it's a bit more difficult.

The easiest case is when the game music is stored in a specific subdirectory of this game and the music files are already in a format that can be easily played (eg: Midi, MP3, Modules) or simply requires a plug-in for Winamp or similar softwares. For example Ureal Tournament 2003 music files are OGG files stored in a Music folder under UT2003 and all you have to find is a plug-in to playback OGG files through Winamp.

Sometimes the music files are stored into a bigger game data file. To obtain these files an extraction is required using some kind of specific tool. The most recent games are usually equipped with an editor or a set of tools that allow extraction of resources from the data files and therefore music can be retrieved by using such softwares. For example the game Blood by Monolith featured a Midi soundtrack and these Midi files could be extracted using the BARF tool which was supplied with the game itself.
If the game doesn't come with its own editor there's probably an editor for free on the internet which will do the same job. And if you don't find any editor or the game is a bit old, music might be extracted using a "file ripper". File rippers have nothing to share with audio CD rippers which extract audio tracks from CDs: a file ripper is a program which scans data files searching for a specific file pattern. If it finds a cluster of data matching the searched pattern it extracts the corresponding data that will hopefully be the music files we are interested in. There are format specific rippers as well as multi-purpose rippers. For example Wing Commander III Midi files and Wing Commander IV Wave files could be extracted using a ripper.
Lucky exceptions where no editor or ripper is required are those data files which are simply zip archives even if they show a different file extension. If your game uses such type of data files simply open them in Winzip or similar software to get access to all files, including music. For example Serious Sam: Second Encounter OGG files are easily retrieved by opening the correct game data file in a zip file extraction tool.

Sometimes the problem is not related to extracting the music files from bigger files rather than obtaining them in a common format. Some games use a specific format for music. However most music composers write their music in a standard format, so this means that the files are simply converted later to the game specific format and thus they can be converted back, provided there's a conversion tool available. Examples of this kind of files are the AMFs (Asylum Music Files) used by the Crusader series games from Origin: AMF files are 8 Channel Modules (MOD) that can be converted back to MOD with the AMF2MOD tool. Also Unreal and Unreal Tournament UMX files are Modules (S3M, XM, IT) which can be retrieved by using the UMXRIP tool or a file ripper. The UMX files can be also played through Winamp directly by using the appropriate plug-in. Also they can be opened in the Unreal Editor and exported to their original format.

Some games feature both the previous snags so music is stored in a data file using a specific format. Prime example of this category are Doom/Doom2/Final Doom Midi files which are stored in the games IWAD files as MUS. One of the many Doom editors or a WAD tool can be used to extract the MUS files from the game. Using a conversion tool will then let you obtain the Midi files (for example you can use Jim Flynn's MMUS2MID utility downloadable from his homepage.)
Wolfenstein 3D and other games using the Wolf3D engine (e.g. Corridor 7: Alien Invasion) fall into this category as well because the music is stored in the data files in the IMF format. Years ago I wrote to Robert Prince author of Wolf3D as well as Doom music who replied that the IMF files were an ADLIB compatible format which could not be readily converted for example to Midi. Recently however I found an IMF2MIDI conversion tool as well as a set of tools (IMFTOOLS) which I used to extract and convert to Midi both Wolf3D and Corridor7 music files. The resulting files generated by the converter were... "messed up" so I used a Midi sequencer to correct a few problems: now I'm placing the conversions here on this page. Click on the links on the left to check out these conversions. Enjoy!