Edit: My brain was tired from studying for a microsoft exam all day, in retrospect this should have gone into tips and tricks.
Ok so from time to time I see a topic pop up about how to go about composing SNES music. As with any other kind of music, there’s a ton of different ways to go about this, all with their different merits, and it just depends on what you want to accomplish. If the goal to create a song that sounds like it belongs on the SNES, one of the best ways to accomplish this is to use actual SNES samples. You could also compose a .mod and use a .mod to .spc converter, but while that would technically result in a song that literally can be played on the SNES, it may or may not result in the SNESy sound you are aiming for. You can also try to make your own samples by .brr-ing existing samples, and now you’re starting to get closer to the goal.
What I’m going to talk about here though, is how to rip the samples straight out of a .spc into .wav for use in Renoise. Before I talk about that, I want to point to this awesome little VST that emulates the actual SNES sampler, and can import .spc’s. I have found it a little weird to work with in terms of finding the samples I’m looking for after importing an spc, but I’m sure that’s user error.
http://picopicose.com/software.html
Now then, onto to sample ripping. Get this:
http://www.romhacking.net/utilities/681/
Your going to have to use a command prompt for this. It’s not hard though. Hold shift and rightclick, and choose open command window here. Then just type spc_decoder.exe which will give you the instructions for using the decoder. Note the other 2, I don’t know where you’d get brr’s from without ripping them out of an spc, but if you have them you can use brr_decoder to convert them to .wav. You also have a .brr encoder here, for if you want to use your own samples and “snesify” them.
Now to point you to some .spc’s. You can get a mega torrent of them here:
Of course they come in .rsn, but you can extract the spc’s with 7zip.
You can also look up individual games from ocremix.org and click the chip icon to download a .rsn.
Now you’re going to want to actually listen to the .spc’s to find a sound you want, for that I recommend this SPC700 player which has a ton of awesome features for isolating channels and finding addresses for samples:
http://www.smwcentral.net/?p=section&a=details&id=4616
But there’s other options out there, like ocremix’s chiplayer winamp plugin.
Find an spc you want, and to make things simple copy into the directory with brr tools. Now run spc_decoder per the instructions it gives you. You have to specify first and last sample you want to rip. -f is first and -l is last, simple enough. The max is 127 so you can just always use -l127 to make sure you get everything. There’s going to be lots of random garbage, and all the “meat” isn’t necessarily put together in the same place.
Another cool thing, the command prompt will give you probable keyzone including a finetune adjustment for all the samples. For example, this instrument I just uploaded:
http://forum.renoise.com/index.php/topic/43528-instruments-chrono-piano/
is a sample ripped from a chrono trigger spc, specifically ct-317.spc. It’s sample 35, which the command prompt tells me should be E +19 cents. I tuned it a little bit differently, but that’s pretty accurate, it was at least correct about it being E,
So an example command prompt line would be:
spc_decoder -f1 l-127 ct-317.spc sample
and that would result in a bunch of wav files named sample_1, sample_2, etc. And at that point, being a Renoise user, you know what to do.