Max Anarchy AAX/ADX question: separate audio channels by TomataVerda at 10:58 AM EDT on July 7, 2014
First of all, hello. Just registered here, nice to meet you all. Second, this topic's been eating away at me.
Ever since the gamerip of the game's demo, the songs in the game have had instrumentals done by whoever made said rips for each song featured. But then in "Disc 2" of said rip, every track had its different sequences ripped separately. (Leads, Vocals, Bass, Rhythm, etc. all split)
That's how it is in the game, everything just kinda' merges or assembles itself.
Considering the music files are in .aax, the files are easy to listen to but some parts sound quieter than others, which got me thinking: just how does one isolate each and every part of the music from those files? I am kinda new to this whole thing and I was thinking of snagging some bits to experiment with sampling, but it's been over a year that I've been trying to find something that works with no dice.
Would be great to know how the rippers did it, and I haven't had much luck understanding through VGMToolbox. Still very new to this whole thing.
I could've sworn there was a tool to split AAX files. It's not VGMToolbox though. Unfortunatly, if I had it, it's on my old "headless" Win XP machine which has been off for months. Maybe someone else can help?
I know how to get the ADX out of an AAX. That's kinda why I pointed out that there were quieter parts: I listened from both AAX and ADX to try and spot a difference and I had none. Every AAX music file contains one isolated ADX for a part of the song, and another ADX for what is meant to loop.
The problem here is figuring out if they have different channels as to where the seperate "layers" of the track are, and finding out how to split them.
Well, for example (I don't know if this is okay according to guidelines or whatever but...), here's This Is Madness by Dilated Peoples in its original .aax file, while the actual song can be heard here.
If you listen to the song, whether it's in .aax or extracted .adx, you can hear the melody has incredibly low volume but it's there.
This has 6 channels. I think the volume issue you're hearing is that whatever you are using to downmix that to stereo is screwing up the level of some of the channels, probably to simulate it being somewhere far off in a 5.1 setup or something.
What you want to do is split out those channels and mix them together more properly.
The vgmstream test.exe actually can do the splitting for you:
test -2 0 -o out0.wav song_ThisIsMadness_multi_wav.aax test -2 1 -o out1.wav song_ThisIsMadness_multi_wav.aax test -2 2 -o out2.wav song_ThisIsMadness_multi_wav.aax
--
or you could just use sox like this to do all the mixing and muxing:
When I do the command it points out that 2 is an unknown option and thus nothing happens. I might be doing something wrong but at least I know it's possible. So close!
EDIT: Figured it out. Used latest vgmstream in the directories. Holy crap. Thank you so much! I am incredibly grateful to you!!