VGM Ripping 101: Part 2 - Playstation Games

Wow... A little over 2 years since my last post... But hey, I'm back!

Today I'll be showing you guys how to rip music from the original Playstation (PSX) games. Now just like any other gaming system, there is no one music format that's used across every single game available on the system. Some developers like to use their own proprietary audio codecs and thus this method cannot be used here. HOWEVER In this post I'll show you how to rip the most common audio format used in PSX games, XA. Before we go one however you'll need to download a few things...

1.  VGMStream. This is a very popular, powerful and versitaile windows command prompt application that can convert a lot of VGM files into a playable format (in this instance wav). You can download the latest version here. Make sure you download the "test.zip" file from the latest version. 
2. VGMToolbox. Another powerful and versatile windows program with a bunch of useful tools for simply ripping VGM files. You can download the latest version here. 
3. An copy of the game you want to rip the music from.

Now you'll need to launch VGMToolbox and navigate to the ISO/ARCHIVE EXTRACTOR. You can really use any program that allows you to view the contents of an image file but I like using VGMToolbox since it's already built in. Plus we'll need to use the program again later on anyways so may as well stay in one program. You'll need to navigate through a series of tree lists on the left hand side of the program to find it. Its listed under VGMToolbox > Misc. Tools > Extraction Tools > Generic > ISO/ARCHIVE EXTRACTOR.

Once you're there take the image file/ISO file of your PSX game and drag & drop it into the right hand side of the VGMToolbox window. You should see something like this...

The filename listed of what you just dragged and dropped will look different depending on the game you're using. Click the "+" button beside it and you should see a folder icon followed by a "\". Click the "+" beside the folder icon and you should see the contents of the game, which should look like this...

Now the files are gonna look different from game to game. But basically what you want to do is look for files with an ".xa" extension. In our case it's pretty obvious that they would be located under the AUDIO folder.

Sure enough, there are a few ".xa" files in the folder! Obviously we want to go with the ones labeled music. So we select our files, right click on them and select "Extract to Subfolder"

This will extract the files to the same folder you're game image/ISO file is in. Now once that is done we need to navigate to another section of VGMToolbox, CD-XA Extractor. It's listed under VGMToolbox > Misc. Tools > Extraction Tools > Streams > CD-XA Extractor. Once your there the program should look like this.

Now the ".xa" files we extracted earlier are actually not the music files. What we just extracted contains the music files inside. So we need to run the files through this extractor in order to get the proper music files. So take the ".xa" files you extracted and drag & drop them where it says "Drop Files Here" and just wait til VGMToolbox finishes. When it's done go back to the folder where you extracted the original ".xa" files and you should see a new folder for each file.

Click inside any of these folders and you'll see the REAL music files (Ironically also with an ".xa" extension) VGMToolbox managed to extract. At this point you can finally close VGMToolbox as we wont be needing it anymore.

Now navigate to the folder where VGMStream is in a separate window. I personally put the window with my extracted files on one side, and the folder with VGMStream on the other. Just makes it easier..

Folder with extracted game music (Left) & folder with VGMStream (Right)

Now all thats left to do is just drag and drop one of your extracted files onto the "test.exe" file where VGMStream is located. You should see a command prompt for at most a few seconds while it converts the file. But when its done you should see a duplicate version of the file you just converted, but with a ".wav" extension.

VGMStream converting extracted file.

Original extracted file and converted ".wav" version.

The ".wav" version is the converted file and can be played with the media player of your choice!

Now as I said earlier. This tutorial won't work for every PSX game. If you can't find ".xa" files when looking through the games files then it more than likely uses a different audio codec. Or the files are hidden within another file. In which case you can extract a game file you think might have ".xa" files and run it through the CD-XA Extractor in VGMToolbox... But it would be a long trial and error process. But anyways this tutorial will work with a lot of PSX games in general so with that being said...

Happy Ripping!