First post, by oneirotekt
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Okay, here's the deal... I'm a freak for game soundtracks and my goal is to have all the great ones recorded or ripped and encoded to super high-quality MP3 for my private hoard (and anyone else geeky enough to want MP3s of C64 SIDs or FM synthesized music from 1990). I figgered I'd post my exploits here because you guys seem to be the most knowledgable about this kind of thing and might have some answers, and just in case anyone else was trying to do the soundtrack ripping thing.
As the music of most 8-bit / 16-bit era PC games is either Adlib or MT-32 I've had some difficulty recording / ripping the tunes. Perfect MT-32 emulation is still a distant dream at this point, so I've concerned myself with extracting the OPL-2 or OPL-3 material - in particular, the great LucasArts games that used synth music: Indy3, Loom, Monkey1, Monkey2, Indy4, DOTT, Sam & Max, as well as the non adventure games like X-Wing, TIE Fighter, and Dark Forces (some of which I think used early general MIDI rather than Adlib).
One method I've used is to run the game with VDMSound (I'm running win2K) and simply record the game's audio output with a program like Soundforge in the background. This requires lots of switching back and forth between game and SF, and sometimes the recording isn't perfect and frequently needs to be trimmed, normalized and offset.
Eventually VDMSound got the ability to dump wave and synth output to a RAW file (thanks vlad!), and this made things easier. However I still needed to separate the output into individual songs, normalize etc. Also, sometimes the in-game music is interrupted by other songs (with the iMuse system the score never plays the same track for very long) or FM sound effects, which I obviously can't correct in post-production.
Recently I discovered an Adlib music player called Adplug ( http://adplug.sourceforge.net ) which is essentially a backend interpreter with integrated OPL-2 emulation for various players such as Winamp. At http://chiptune.de I found some game music files that Adplug plays quite nicely. Among these were some Lucasarts tunes, some of which (Indy3, Loom, Monkey1) play perfectly, but all the later games don't sound right at all. Using ScummRev ( http://scummrev.mixnmojo.com ) I was able to verify that the problem isn't with the LAA files, as they're the same ADLs the game uses extracted from the resource files, and it's not with Adplug's OPL-2 emulation engine (as it seems to be the same one that both VDMSound and ScummVM ( http://www.scummvm.org/ ) uses) but with the LAA interpreter.
In conclusion:
* VDMSound and ScummVM both emulate the old LucasArts game music perfectly, but recording from in-game sucks / isn't possible.
* Adplug makes ripping really easy, but the later Lucas games aren't handled properly.
* I need either a better Adplug .LAA / .ADL interpreter, or ScummVM or VDMS need the ability to play ADL music resources "as is"!
Anyone tried to do a similar thing, or have any knowledge that might be useful? I've searched everywhere for info on the subject but no piece of software seems to meet my particular needs.
