Basic Needs of Pack Creation

From vgmrips

Emulator

The most accurate emulator for your target system/chips. Category:Emulators with VGM logging has a table that lists the emulators allowed for VGMRips rips.

For instance, for Sega Master System games, you want Meka. And for the Mega Drive, it's the most current nightly build of BlastEm. (At the time of this writing, that's the one released on August 7, 2023.)

VGM Player/Converter

A program, or plug-in for a music player, which can play VGM logs and create WAV (.wav) files from them. (.flacs will work and can even be smaller, if the #Sound Editor that you later choose can open those.)

VGMPlay is the player maintained by ValleyBell. As its page linked there explains, you can easily make it create .wavs by changing options in the .ini file, or using command line switches.

Maybe that sounds too intimidating at this stage. You might be more comfortable using the plugin version of VGMPlay - in_vgm - with a compatible player. Here are two functional options:

VGMPlay and in_vgm share a wiki page, so you can find many usage details on either one there (in theory; the page is in progress, and your feedback/help adding to it is appreciated!).

VGM-Manipulating Tools

A plethora of VGM Tools, also maintained by ValleyBell, let you trim and tag the VGMs when that step comes. All are command-line based. Eventually you'll need to get accustomed to the command line (I'll help; it's not a scary volcano god), but if you want a GUI option, there are two:

  • VGMTool is venerable and easy. However, it always compresses VGMs even if you tell it not to, and this can be a little inconvenient.
  • VGMToolbox is newer, and like vgm_tag it can tag many VGMs with the same info at once. The problem is that under rare but currently-unknown circumstances, it can mangle VGMs or cause them to stop working with vgmlpfnd. (If you can manage to find and repeat any bug you meet, that'll help muchly.)

If all that sounds intimidating, don't worry. Before you can do any of this, you'll have to log the VGMs first. Then we'll look at these programs.

Sound Editor

We'll use this with the WAVs you create from VGMs to find trimming points. Any program that can show you what the music looks like (its waveform) and help you get exact sample numbers (points inside the waveform) can work for this step. If you don't already have a program like that, here are some (mostly freeware) options:

7-zip

Part of pack creation, naturally, is packing up the pack. Your computer might already let you do this without extra tools, making 7-zip optional to get. But Ultra-compressed .7z archives of uncompressed vgms can be much smaller than ZIP archives, and this makes them good for making quick backups of your vgms as you go.

Guides

That's not just a quirky way of saying you need what you're already reading. For convenience, you may want to save copies of this and the other relevant guides/help pages/forum threads, for easy offline access.

(It's easy to compare the dates of the last edits to find out if your copies are outdated, too. The History link at the top of each Wiki page will tell you. Special:Recent Changes (linked in the sidebar, can't seem to get this to work...) can tell you of many at once, though up to a time limit.

Continue to (or go back to) R(er)ipping for the Out-of-Element Contributor for the list of ripping steps.

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