vgmrips

Yo, I've been working on this database for a few months now, I figured I'd let you see it. So far it imports all the MDX files in the neko68k collection. The MDX titles are converted to utf-8 and stored in a MySQL DB. The importer also extrapolates other data, as you can see:

http://mdx.vampi.tech

Right now the plan is to add a JS player, which will be possible due to the fact that I've written a MDX player as part of mdxtools (currently in beta) and my plan is to compile that with emscripten.

However, I'll need help with the song data, I've started a spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

and I'll need help filling in the track name, authors, date, company, type, product JP (original name), product EN and platform fields. Most of the data in there is extrapolated from directory names and MDX titles, some is hand-input.

As you can see in the site, MDX files are grouped in 'sets', and sets belong to a 'product'. Products can be games, anime, TV shows etc. Products have a list of releases.

Some interesting results of storing this data in a relational DB: I was easily able to find the most used FM voice, which is a nice FM bass. I was also able to find the most used PDX file, which is BOS.PDX (Bosconian). There are many more queries that can be made. I was thinking of adding a histogram of song releases per author, so we can see the time they were active. Generally the MDX scene lasted for 5 years, I think from '88 to '93 or something like that.

Anyway, have fun browsing those files, and if you'd like to help, please see the get involved page.

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What a great database and spreadsheet!
...but over 28,000 records...Sagrada Família...

"title" maybe come from MDX header, but what must be fill be "track title" row...umm...

Title is from the MDX header, and track title is the simplified track title, for example:



becomes

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Hi Vampi. I used to collect these wonderful sets a long time ago. I've managed to put all of my findings ever in this archive. These files came mostly from 3 sources, the Share P2P app, the 2ch boards, and an automated rip of the MDXOnline site. Due to the nature of old school P2P, some files are likely dupes, modified just enough to present as "new." Over the years, I've added more findings, but most of these are just repacks of the MDXOnline rip. Maybe you'll find some of these files are new to your collection.

A little history for newcomers: MDXOnline was an old Japanese site available only through the MDXWin player (or an app that came with it called MDXAss.exe). Unfortunately, you could only download one song at a time as bandwidth in those days was much more limited. In order to download and catalog these MDX's, some folks in the rom collecting scene tried to reverse engineer the custom network protocol used by MDXAss, but were unsuccessful. So in order to get the whole archive, an automated clicker script was used (forgot the name by now). One issue was the MDXass application would often download BOS.PDX even when it wasn't needed. So, it's important to validate using the PDX data field in the header MDX file.

Another interesting note. Some of the text files that accompany the original packs included encoded MDX files in them. Kind of like BASE64 or uuencode (for the OGs). I don't remember the format, but it uses some sort of Japanese .exe to decode. Last time I looked into this, the tool was still pretty easy to find.

In any case, I'll quiet down now, but I'm excited to see your collection and wanted to share my obsession with the format from years ago and I hope that this may help your collection grow!

Oh dude. This looks really good, I'm so grateful! I had found some small collections myself, along with readme files. I've used neko68k's collection as a starting point, but that does not contain any readme files. I'll show you the sites I already found but it looks like they might be included in your collection. Really nice job.

Now I need to get a new hard drive cause I don't have any space to unpack these all for the importer

Don't worry about duplicate MDX files, it's fairly easy to calculate the MD5 sum of the data portion, skipping the tag portion at the start of the file. Did you know that on the X68k you can do 'type file.mdx' to view the title? The title ends with 0x1a, which is interpreted as EOF.

Also, if you look in the spreadsheet I've posted above, you can see some of the MDX authors and some of them have twitter accounts.

I'll have a look at those encoded MDX files you spoke of, I've also found some weird MDX files, compressed with LZX. In fact, by disassembling MXC, the player that came with MXDRV, I found that multiple compression methods are supported, but in my collection I only found LZX compressed files. MXC needs the LZX executable to be in PATH and it can play those for you. I think MMDSP just runs MXC as well. I haven't found a way to decompress those LZX files outside of X68000 though.

Anyway, thanks a lot man.

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Hey man, I'm looking at the "Snakemeat's DATs" folder and it seems it's fairly well organized, similar to TOSEC. Do you know who pulled this off?

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Yeah, that was me. I used to be pretty involved in TOSEC and other emulation/rom/console preservation scenes. I put a lot of time into cataloging the MDX and other music sets. MDX was my personal favorite though, because it felt like exploring new territory: looking at all the old readme files from halfway around the world. Here's my old site with other helpful stuff.

Eventually though, I started working more on VGMToolbox and other ripping tools and found that more challenging and fun. Now I have 4 kids and don't have much time to focus on these things like I used to.

You've downloaded the MDX collection from this website?

It is an archive for things like that. PMD, FMP, MDX and FM TOWNS (I don't know how to play FM TOWNS music data, oh sad).


PS: Spindizzy 2/Uranus, or Spindizzy 2\Eternal Move (CTTY.MDX). SO GOOD!!!

Thanks Dekyo-NO, interesting resource. I've downloaded the files and I'll take a better look when I get some spare time. I'm glad to see some kanji PDX files, which were missing from the neko68k collection, it looks good.

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I hope that helps in something.


Also, a question. If there are MDX that requires PDX for correct playback, what you will do if some of the PDX required are not in any folder, or something like that?

I can define a list of common folders for pdx files. Right now that's part of the importer, and that needs a lot of work. If the pdx file is missing, the player simply doesn't play ADPCM samples. The problem you mentioned is not a very big issue.

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For the case that You have a Windows box, then, from a SOUND SHOCK FM synthesis discussion forum thread, You can download

EUP command line player .

It worked for me.

P.S. I'm trying to make a player myself (from a code base taken from the internet) streaming PCM to SDL media layer, but I cannot control rate and it run as hell.

Maybe going off topic here, but you can set the frequency (sample rate) in the SDL_AudioSpec that you request when calling SDL_OpenAudioDevice(). You can just set it to the frequency of that stream and SDL's sound driver will typically resample it for you.

But if you for example mix multiple streams and therefore want to have the output stream with a different sample rate, you need a resampler. Linear resampling or nearest-neighbor (like if you use a delta counter) will result in bad sound quality, so maybe you'll want to use a resampler library, like libsamplerate.

Thank you, it worked perfectly! I'm new to FM-TOWNS. I hope there's good music!


PS: Sorry for the off-topic post.