Converting GH3 tracks to FOF - New format used in GH3 ?

[DotAtSlash]

Just saw Guitar Hero 3 up on Demonoid, 186 Seeders, 2023 leachers.

Its almost here! hopefully someone will convert and get it up quick



EDIT: forgot to mention, the torrent was ps2, meaning YES it is up-loadable.


2nd edit: dam i got owned by a mod. Never making a new thread again.

[adthrawn]

I have the PS2 torrent done on my pc. Let me know how I can help...

[YMS]

Since nobody told me a tool for it, and I wasn't able to find one anywhere, I wrote a quick & dirty MSV stream ripper / MSV-to-VAG converter.

With it, you get 6 VAG files out of an IMF (MSV) file (maybe less or more - do all GH3 tracks have an rhythm track?). Those are mono left / right tracks for guitar / song / rhythm, and you can convert and merge them (I personally converted them to WAV in MFAudio, put each two WAVs together in Audacity and converted those merged tracks to OGG in Audacity, too.).

So here are, as an example, guitar.ogg, song.ogg and rhythm.ogg for "Metal Heavy Lady" by Lions.

I will publish the converter tool soon, so someone can rip the music, but I'm not in a hurry, since we don't have the MIDI files anyway.
(Those PAK files are not encrypted, too. But they're binary data just like those data chunks there are left in the IMF file, and I don't know anything about them yet).

[cama]

Thanks YMS for you amazing job i checked your oggs and sounds amazing , now only need found any idea how extract notes and convert to mid. I think neversoft not used .mid format maybe any own notes format ? .. hope im wrong and will be .mid file in game too.

[Moonflow43]

I will publish the converter tool soon

freakin. sweet.

awesome job YMS! regardless of how easy you said it was, i wouldn't have been able to figure it out.
so now that we can get the music, we are half way there (technically speaking).

[v4vendetta]

They might not necessarily be rhythm, some might be bass. I guess you have to listen to each one to know for sure, unless that info is on wikipedia.

[FTGF]

I'm still taking these files apart and can't seem to find the MIDI files, think their in the .pak file, or ims? guess im no good at this...the search goes on

[YMS]

http://rapidshare.com/files/64942591/msv2vag10.rar.html

Here's the MSV2VAG converter. If you want to rip a song, copy msv2vag.jar and the song's IMF file (we won't need the ISF one, unless we want to rip preview sounds) into one directory, and then run it in a console, like:

java -jar msv2vag.jar name.imf

This (hopefully) will result in bringing you several files (depending what tracks there are):
songname_G1.vag - guitar left channel
songname_G2.vag - guitar right channel
songname_S1.vag - song left channel
...
songname_R2.vag - rhythm right channel
songname_G1.rest - "rest data". Might be junk and therefore deletable, might as well contain MIDI information we'll need later.

After this conversion (MSV to VAGs) the work for you (the ripper ) begins, see my post above: Combine and convert all the VAGs with other tools.


I provided source code with my converter, so if you encounter problems, and you know how to program in Java, you might be able to help yourself. If not, contact me.
Source code includes also my MSV file format specs, a list of known problems, ...

So ... now you could start ripping the songs, if you've got the PS2 version of GH3. It will be quite some work, though, and maybe it's better for you to wait if we are able to obtain those MIDIs we need, too, before you start.


Now for the MIDIs. I believe them rather to be in the PAK than in the IMF "rest data", but no matter where, they are quite sure in a custom binary format, not MIDI. This is going to be the harder part for sure!

[Sarge51]

Now if we could just get someone who got the game early.

[FTGF]

Now if we could just get someone who got the game early.

Check the torrent sites, they're everywhere.

So i decrypted the .pak file and still no luck opening it...

:Edit: okay if someone could send me a .pak file from the ps2 version of the game i might have some luck, i got an idea.

[adthrawn]

For whatever reason, I can't find the pak files on my PS2 disc. I see imf, isf, and msv.

[YMS]

Okay, news on the PAK files: They definitely don't contain any data that's note-chart-related. No chance to get MIDIs out of them.

I don't know what they contain, but they are almost identical for every song, only differing in very few bytes at the beginning and the end of the files (smaller PAK files being completely included in some bigger ones).

(This is for the big .pak files. The _sfx.pak and _gfx.pak files are too small anyway, and some of them are completely identical to each other).


That leaves us the "data rest" of the IMF file (Or are there more files that could possibly contain MIDI-like information?).
I don't know much about it, only that it's structured similar, but not identical to the VAG files, and that it's neither MIDI files nor SEQ files (PlayStation MIDI).

I noticed that the final version of my converter (other than earlier version) doesn't extract these "rest data" correctly for some reason.
Since I now believe that this data really contains the data we need for our MIDI, I'll deliver a fixed version tomorrow. In the meantime, can someone upload another IMF file, for researching purposes ?

[v4vendetta]

i unpacked .HED archive and inside songs folder with probably packed (in .pak format) notes .. if anyone want try unpack this .pak here uploaded folder http://rapidshare.com/files/64801561/songs.rar

Aren't the midi's in these files?

[YMS]

No, those are the PAK files I was just talking about. They don't contain note charts, that's for sure.

Annotation to what I've said about the "data rest" (I need a better name for that! ) of the IMF files: It's organized in 128-KiB-chunks, just like the rest of the IMF file, and therefore the "datamerged" file I delivered in the VAG pack I've uploaded some time before should represent the data corretly and without unnecessary blank lines. That's if somebody want's to look at it.

[FTGF]

Okay, news on the PAK files: They definitely don't contain any data that's note-chart-related. No chance to get MIDIs out of them.

I don't know what they contain, but they are almost identical for every song, only differing in very few bytes at the beginning and the end of the files (smaller PAK files being completely included in some bigger ones).

(This is for the big .pak files. The _sfx.pak and _gfx.pak files are too small anyway, and some of them are completely identical to each other).


That leaves us the "data rest" of the IMF file (Or are there more files that could possibly contain MIDI-like information?).
I don't know much about it, only that it's structured similar, but not identical to the VAG files, and that it's neither MIDI files nor SEQ files (PlayStation MIDI).

I noticed that the final version of my converter (other than earlier version) doesn't extract these "rest data" correctly for some reason.
Since I now believe that this data really contains the data we need for our MIDI, I'll deliver a fixed version tomorrow. In the meantime, can someone upload another IMF file, for researching purposes ?

Okay I understand, you seem to have the grasp of this, whereas i have been lost for days, haha. Ill try to get ahold of antoher song for you.


Edit just read this on score hero by dgendreau

"I think I have MSV format figured out for VGSPlayer, but I cant decode the MIDI files yet. I extracted a song PAK file by hand and it contained a midi and a script file, but the midi file appears to be compressed or scrambled in .QB format, whatever that is. Anyone have any luck with them yet?

Here are my MSV file format notes so far:

All songs are in the /music folder on the disc.
the 125, 150 and 200 branches appear to contain the time stretched guitar tracks for practice mode

.MSV files are mono audio files
.ISF files appear to be short stereo song preview clips
.IMF files look like the full multi-stream song files.
All of these files are in what I will call "MSV" format

Each MSV file consists of streams interleaved in 128kb blocks.
All integer values in the file appear to be in *big-endian* format as opposed to VGS which was little endian.

Each stream starts with its own 64 byte MSV header containing:
- the signature "MSVp"
- the block size of 131072
- the number of bytes in this stream (should be a little less than file size / # streams)
- the sample rate (look for common values like 11025, 16000, 22050, 33075, 44100)
- the song / stream name

Following the MSV header is a sequence of what appear to be standard 16 byte XA frames, but I have not yet decoded any of them to see if they are.

streams 0,1 - band L,R
streams 2,3 - Lead GTR L,R
streams 4,(5) - Rhythm/Bass GTR L,R or Mono

I hope that helps move things along."