Hey there. I am looking to import a whole bunch of tracks from pokemon FRLG for my project, Pokemblem.
I’ve used febuilder’s menu system for it so far, and it works for a lot of tracks, but the occasional one will not work / crash the game.
From looking into gba_mus_riper, I’ve found that it gives a few configuration options, mostly to do with drum issues. I’ve tried out this option & dumped the midis / combined .sf2 file, but I’m not sure about inserting these files into my project properly. The generated .sf2 file is 7 mb, which is quite large, but I tried inserting it into my hack via sappy, which worked, but I couldn’t get the tracks to actually use this soundfont for whatever reason. I’m not really sure how to do this properly. I also tried ripping as separate sound banks, which made it 224 mb instead. I think that inserting some sort of combined soundfont would save a lot of space versus a separate one for every track. That said, I can probably live without every track in the game.
Ultimately I could just use some random music I find in the repo, but if anyone can offer some assistance with this, it’d be appreciated.
Idk if this discord link will work for you, but Alusq went into great detail on importing samples, here.
I think the .sf2 file is mostly useful for something like CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth, which allows you to listen to .midi files (for example, those ripped by gba_mus_riper) in that soundfont when playing these in Anvil or some other software.
what did you try to do, and what was the result? can’t help you without more detail here
Also, the 7MB file is likely to account for every single WAV audio in the game including Pokemon cries and SFX. I’m pretty sure all of the music uses only one bank/soundfont so the music data alone should be smaller than that.
I think I tried to import a track and set it to play using the instruments at the address where I’d inserted the gigantic 7mb .sf2 file. The result was immediate game crashing, so I probably did it wrong.
I can try again when I have the chance to in a few days. Thanks for the input you two - I read the discord logs and they were helpful for some more general understanding, though I’m still not certain about how exactly to insert the soundfont that I need.
Hold on… do you mean you tried to insert the .sf2 directly using Sappy? Unless there has been some major development, you can’t do that. You need to rip each WAV from the .sf2 and set up your own map manually. Pokemon has a lot of multi-instruments so you need to set up the maps for those as well.
7743 solved a track for me and showed me how, and from there I was able to get the rest working.
The drums are incorrect for about half of the tracks right now, but not that noticable, for the most part. 1 track still freezes the game but I may be able to solve that later (credits bgm, so no rush lol). I will probably make use of nimap2’s drums eventually, but for now I am just happy it sounds identical in all other instruments and doesn’t crash the game.
I highly recommend using the import music from other gba games button in febuilder for anyone in the future having similar problems. The pokemon tracks were incredibly easy to fix as it was always the drum part in voice 1 right at the top of the samples that I had to replace each time.
