You can use VGM trans on DS, for any game that uses SSEQ, to extract MIDI's, and convert the instruments to DLS (Which is nice for FL's fruity lsd plugin). The only issue, is that won't work on the Pokemon Mystery dungeon games (Darkness, Time, and Sky) because they use a different format. Also, for some reason, the GBA tool doesn't rip some of the Synths from the Golden Sun series
Edit: The modulation/pitch bend seems a little strong on these rips. I was working on a tool to mass convert/edit midis, idk if i can add something to fix them...
I'm just repeating what others have said, but this seems to work best with games that result in bigger GSFlib files (because they almost always have bigger and more heavily compressed samples). So Circle of the Moon is a much better example of what you can get than Harmony of Dissonance or Aria of Sorrow. Although I remember swapping the SF2 files on the latter two, and one of the resulting sets (AOS-->HOD, I think) resulted in a few rather impressively Silent Hill-esque noise tracks.
And of course, as noted, this doesn't always produce perfect results, as in the case of the Golden Sun games or some Mother 3 tracks.
Knurek is using this to double-check for missing tracks in previously-submitted GSF sets, right? I think he said something like that.
Of all the non-"Sappy" sets I'd like to see this done with, I think I'm most interested in what Sword of Mana would sound like. Although it'd be nice to figure out what all those anime license Konami games have going on, of course.
I was hoping I'd be able to use this or that program to convert the MIDI/SF2 pairs to MOD-type files that could be more easily played in browser via plugin, but I guess there are some commands that MIDI supports which can't be replicated in MOD format....
anyway, ramble ramble ramble, if anyone can pull off a similar gain in clarity for a DS game, I'd love to hear it. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I can't begin to guess what games would benefit from undergoing the process.
(Someone should also make a Youtube channel for gsfmusriper conversions...I would, but I have too many neuroses not to flake out)
This is really old news...unless I'm missing something? GBAMusRiper has been out for a long time, and has been updated to v2 early this year, and VGMTrans has also been around for quite some time. Or are you talking about something else?
It pretty much only works for games that use the "Sappy" engine. So any games that open in that. IIRC, none of the mario games worked (not too sure about super circuit or Mario Party Advance)
That's a shame considering that Mario and Luigi has a pretty good soundtrack. The Super Mario Advance 1 thing took me by surprise... guess they changed the sound engine afterwards?
Camelot GBA Games by soneek at 9:45 AM EDT on August 24, 2014
Any games developed by Camelot (Golden Sun, Mario Golf/Tennis) will be missing the synths used over the square lead and polysynth instruments. A good number of songs come out incomplete because of this.