How to extract audio from PC game?

2014-02-04 06:04:49

Hello people, first of all I tried to search another post talking about this but I didn't find anything so I hope this topic won't be bothering.
My question is simple. I want to extract the music from a PC video game. I read out there a guy did it with foobar 2000, then what I did was to download the program and try it, but I honestly have no idea how. I tried to search but I only found things like how to rip a CD and make it flac and such, nothing related to what I want to do.
And if the case is this program is not useful to do what I want to do, if somebody knows how could I do it.
The further I could reach was to get .IMU files (the songs) I took from the .BUN music file of the game, I did it with a program called Dragon UnPACKer. But then I don't know how to convert these .IMU files to MP3 or any other format. I don't really mind the format but if the result is MP3 I'm more than pleased with that.
Anyway I hope I could get some help in here.
Thanks everybody in advance!

How to extract audio from PC game?

Reply #1 – 2014-02-04 08:17:47

Tried using foo_input_vgmstream?

How to extract audio from PC game?

Reply #2 – 2014-02-05 14:31:38

I remember that there used to be sound cards which had a recording source called "What-U-hear" in their drivers. When recorded from, it would dump the output of the internal mixer. So you could digitally record whatever the computer was playing back.

Unfortunately, I haven't seen this ever since everyone became obsessed with DRM, DHCP etc. If I recall correctly, Windows 7 might contain protection technologies explicitly preventing the above on the OS level.

There is possibly some SW which disguises itself as a kernel sound card driver and a virtual sound card and allows one to "capture" playback from applications. Much like Demon Tools DVD drive. Note that reverse-engineering music from games might violate the EULA of the PC game and rights of the game's authors. Some games have their audio tracks as MP3 in the installation folder and some don't - I guess there's a reason.

How to extract audio from PC game?

Reply #3 – 2014-02-05 15:11:25

Extracting game audio is not "reverse-engineering" by any sense of the word. Most of the time, game audio is either in Ogg Vorbis (quite often), mp3 or IMA ADPCM (mostly games before 2005) and if not, it is in some propertiary game format that is usually an ADPCM variant or an obscure psychoacoustic codec and can be played by an utility from the codec's website (like say Bink Audio or Westwood's .AUD ADPCM files). A lot of the time, the music is in fact just mp3/ogg/Linear PCM, but packed in a game archive file/files.

My tip for the OP? Search for instructions on the internet how to extract audio from the game you want. As far as I know, there is no copyright law against extracting obscure formats (or often just .zip or mp3 files with a different extension) and no law that would dictate "You must listen to ingame soundtracks only when you're play the game". Game soundtracks can be sold separately, true, but usually those are different mixes, and in lossless quality, as most game music is low/medium bitrate lossy (Warcraft 3 for example has the music as 44.1 Khz 112/128 kbps mp3 files while Red Alert 2 uses 22 Khz IMA ADPCM, there are exceptions through, Flatout has Vorbis VBR files with an average bitrate of over 160 kbps and often over 192 kbps for example).