DKC Atlas Forum

For this Christmas, I said I wanted FL Studio. However, there are too many versions on amazon.com to choose from. I don't know which version I need to ask for. Basically, I need to be able to extract SNES music from the Donkey Kong Country game roms, and use bits and pieces of it to compose my own custom DKC music. Does anybody know how to use FL Studio that way?

First of all, the music in the SNES ROMs isn't going to be in a PC-friendly data format. You aren't going to be able to just instantaneously pull the music out of the games and into FL Studio.

To actually be able to have that music you would need to have a way of ripping an SPC file into its individual samples, along with a MIDI file. Perhaps this topic will provide some clues?

Note that the game's internal format for music storage is not the same as the code that runs inside the SPC700 core.

Secondly - that seems a little bit expensive just to be able to sequence up some music.

I've never understood the "fine arts" industries making their stuff so ridiculously expensive (and hard to use). There are probably tons of people, like me, who could manage to make music on their own if the paywall wasn't there.

As far as the fine arts things go, they're so expensive because they can make it that way and people will have to buy it. Like photoshop is pretty much an industry standard, so you have to have it and they know they can make you pay upwards of $600ish for it. Douche move, I know, but they get away with it by being the best and/or an industry standard.

Hopefully I can help out here, as I have the FL Studio Signature Bundle, and have enjoyed tinkering with it over the past 10 years or so. I'm by no means an expert, but I can happily recommend FL Studio as a powerful, user-friendly, attractive and feature-packed DAW (digital audio workstation).

Simion and Phyre mentioned over-pricing of creative software, and I do believe this applies to the Adobe Creative suite (Photoshop, etc.), but not to FL Studio; honestly, for the amount of features and polish you get, FL Studio would be worth the asking price (in my humble opinion) even if Image-Line didn't offer lifetime free updates (which they impressively do). The development team are constantly working hard to deliver new features and better performance — most of which we get without paying another cent (although some special plugins are developed as an optional, payable extra). I very rarely buy software, but even though I go for long periods of time without using FL Studio, I never have regretted the purchase — it's a wonderful piece of software to have.

The good news is that even the most affordable FL Studio package ought to be perfect for the project you're describing — and you can always upgrade (it'll only cost you the price difference, you won't have to pay for the program again) if ever you want/need the additional features of the more advanced packages.

I'd be happy to lend a hand from time to time if you need a bit of guidance through any stage of your project; I've done all of what you've mentioned, so I can assure you it's not too difficult to do, but help is available if you need it.

Qyzbud wrote:I'd be happy to lend a hand from time to time if you need a bit of guidance through any stage of your project; I've done all of what you've mentioned, so I can assure you it's not too difficult to do, but help is available if you need it.

Well, Christmas is still a month in a half away, so I it will be a while before I get FL Studio. But in the meantime, I thought it would be wise to learn how to extract audio samples from SNES game roms so that I have something to work with once I get FL Studio. Since the utility from http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/47/ isn't working on my computer, what tool or utility do you recommend for extracting audio samples from SNES roms?

Does any of the stuff from http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=65193 ring any bells?

I've never used it, so I can't tell you if it's any good, but Reaper is a fairly cheap program, and it allows you to trial it so you can see if it does what you want first.

As for extracting the music, I know ZSNES at least allows you to mute certain audio tracks (other emulators probably have this option too), so one method you could use is to mute every track except for the one you want and record the game's audio with another program like Audacity. It could be a bit time consuming though. And make sure you pause the game first, because other sounds (like from enemies or idle animations) will sometimes use the music's audio tracks if there are no other tracks available.

I meant to address this in my previous post:

UncleBazerko wrote:I need to be able to extract SNES music from the Donkey Kong Country game roms, and use bits and pieces of it to compose my own custom DKC music.

The music is all available as SPC files (DKC/2/3, or here), which include the sample and sequence data; you shouldn't need to do any extracting from ROMs yourself unless you wish to get other sound effects — which can actually be extracted using ZSNES by pressing F1 just as a sample begins to play, and selecting save SPC data from the popup menu. If you really wish to do the data diving yourself, there are surely ways (including SNESSOR, which you could get working with a bit of patience and problem solving, no doubt), but alternative means exist.

Does any of the stuff from http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=viewthread&t=65193 ring any bells?

No, but it does look interesting...

Sockpuppet wrote:[...] Reaper is a fairly cheap program, and it allows you to trial it so you can see if it does what you want first.

You can trial FL Studio, too — the only restriction is saving your project, as far as I know.

Sockpuppet raises a worthwhile point, though; if you haven't already done so, you may wish to trial a whole bunch of different DAWs to see which you like the feel of most. Odds are, they'd all be capable of doing what you want, but FL Studio is the only one I can speak from experience about.

Qyzbud wrote:which can actually be extracted using ZSNES by pressing F1 just as a sample begins to play

What's this?:

Frames Per Second meter?

UncleBazerko wrote:For this Christmas, I said I wanted FL Studio. However, there are too many versions on amazon.com to choose from. I don't know which version I need to ask for. Basically, I need to be able to extract SNES music from the Donkey Kong Country game roms, and use bits and pieces of it to compose my own custom DKC music. Does anybody know how to use FL Studio that way?

So you want to rip DKC instrument samples and use them to make custom music.

Get the SPC music for the games and use SPCTool. It may be time consuming and buggy as hell but you can rip the samples from any of the SPCs. The downside is the tedium of finding them though the program is nice enough to highlight the samples played when you play an SPC in it.

Here's some soundfonts that may get you started a bit faster.

Hey all, new here, huge dkc fan. Its the reason i started making music. I know this is a bit old but I wanted to let you know that there IS a SNES styled soundfont floating around. Its probably the closest you'd get if you want the authentic SNES sounding instruments. I can't seem to find it but i know it used to be on Zophar's domain before.

EDIT: http://woolyss.com/chipmusic-soundfonts.php Its on here actually. Setzers soundfont. If you check out the "muted trumpet" on there its pretty close to some you would hear in DKC