As the title suggests, what started as porting Book 1’s music for use in GFE1R turned into me porting the entire game’s soundtrack. Of course all of them are free to use as long as you give credit.
In this download you will not just find .s files for every FE3 song, but you’ll also find copies of the spcs I used to get the midis, the midis I ripped from the spcs, and format-0 versions of said midis with loop points set for every song. There is also a .ups patch included with this package. If you apply it to a clean FE8U rom you can listen to all the music in-game. All music is unlocked in the Sound Room and due to the way I worked with this rom to port the music every single vanilla song is overwritten and then some. Additionally, there’s a few bonus songs in the patch not present in the download, though none of them are from FE3.
I rushed through a fair portion of the songs from Book 2 onward (I did Book 1 over the course of a few weeks, I did the rest in the past 24 hours) so if you find any mislabeled songs, songs that don’t loop properly, etc. let me know so I can fix them! A few songs (~7) are borked, but currently it’s almost 4 AM and I just wanted to get this out there.
Credits:
Yuka Tsujiyoko for composing the excellent Mystery of the Emblem soundtrack
SPC Spread Committee for dumping the SPCs I used
Mike and loveemu for making and maintaining VGMTrans
Willow Software for making Anvil Studio @Zane for introducing me to VGMTrans, even though I forgot to actually look into it like 5 minutes later @serif for once again introducing me to VGMTrans, this time for real @Kirb for being awesome and also being the spur for this project to begin with
Shoutouts to SimpleFlips
The rom I ended up using for this was just a random dumping ground for testing things prior to being used for this project, so credit to Trueblade1990 for the Master Knight animations that are still in there from me testing things
The people who stole mid2agb and released it online @Pikmin1211 for encouraging me at the beginning @7743 for making FEBuilderGBA, which made fine-tuning the music much, much easier and also for the technical support on Discord @DerSlendy because you deserve a shoutout @Runa for teaching me the basics of GBA music in the beginning
Lastly, videos of a handful of the music tracks in-game:
This last once again an example of this being an old dumping ground for testing things, the third song in this video is (unfortunately) not included in the package:
There’s a fair bit involved here, but once you get it down it isn’t that difficult.
SNES music in particular has a dedicated community that rips SNES music in the form of SPCs, which are files containing the note sequence, the instrument samples, and some metadata. Using VGMTrans you can rip the note sequences as midi files. It also uses the SPC’s instrument data to set the voice for each track, so unlike older SPC to midi tools you don’t have to set the instruments yourself. However, the default instruments aren’t always the best so it’s a good idea to mess with them to get something that you like.
If you’re looking for SPCs you can find large collections of them here.
mid2agb is a Nintendo-created tool that was obtained in an illegal server hack
also, nice work
edit: on actually listening, the quality of these conversions is… dubious. You need to adjust a lot of the bass guitar lines an octave up as the FE8 instrument is set to play an octave lower. Many of the instruments are just wrong and/or poor choices as compared with the originals (where are the flutes in your main theme conversion?). The master volume is too loud in some of the songs which is what gives rise to the crackling sounds that are evident in your sample videos. You’ve doubled some of the instruments and they are playing the same note in some of your songs which will cause the game to play those notes at double volume so the levels are kinda crappy.
anyway, I don’t wanna shit all over your work but there are a lot of improvements to be made and if you want to make it a public resource, well… you have some work to do.
Thanks for the feedback. This isn’t the final version of it, there are songs that I’d like to completely redo but I just wanted to get this out there, so I’ll take this into consideration moving forward.
Is there solid documentation of the SPC format you could point me at? It might be worth attempting to make a converter directly to AGB, rather than going through MIDI.
(I made ZSE so this seems like something I ought to be able to handle)
According to what I’ve read SPCs are just dumps of the SNES’ SPC-700 co-processor, which is used to handle music. The thing about SPCs is that every company that made games for the SNES did them slightly differently; therefore, the conversion for each company’s music is different as well. I would point you to the source code of VGMTrans, as well as this documentation on how the SPC-700 works, and finally the SPCs hosted at snesmusic.org, as the site also has some information on SPCs, as well as being a helpful resource for obtaining SPCs. It would be amazing if you could manage a converter directly from SPC to AGB, I know that SPCs have loop points set in them that are lost in the conversion to MIDI so maintaining them would be one less step in the process.
all of the music is borked up, whenever i take a hit it does an OOOOOOOOOOOO sound and the musics are all swapped, such as medeus book 1 being the enemy attack theme and the together we ride being the death music
forgot to mention that i’m using fe8
