Converting .SPC format songs to .MP3

*Download the Terranigma Soundtrack Here*

An .SPC format song is specific to Super Nintendo Music. Of course, we are referring to the method of extracting the music from the chosen game ROM itself (Using an emulator such as ZSNES) which saves it to a file.

Think of an .SPC file like a Midi file; It stores musical data that instructs the sound synthesizer what tunes to play, and with what instruments. The difference is that it's in a format that only a Super Nintendo (or an emulator such as ZSNES) can interpret and play as music.

But that said, you can still ultimately get that exact same music playing in your Ipod, or wherever else you want to play it. And that's what this guide is here to show you.

Above: .SPC files as they appear in Windows 98. Apparently SPC is also some form of certificate file, so you should open them from within Winamp, or use 'Open With' if you're in Explorer. All SPC dumps seem to be 65kb no matter how long or short the song is.

There are two ways. Google them, or extracting the songs from the game yourself.

I suggest the first one, because if you can find the entire soundtrack on the net somewhere, it means that someone has already done all the work of capturing and maybe even correctly titleing the songs for you.

But if the songlist doesn't seem to be complete or if you are otherwise unhappy with the versions you find, read on to see how to do it yourself...

Getting your chosen song from in the game to a .SPC file requires you to run the game ROM through ZSNES (Let's use ZSNES v1.42 as an example);

As mentioned at the start of this article, the .SPC format is akin to a MIDI file in that they are both instructions to the sound device telling it what notes to play and with what instruments. But it's contents were never meant to be accessed from beyond a SNES system so SPC data is useless on a PC.
Unless you have a special program that recognizes and interprets it for you.

The special program you need is a Winamp plugin called SNesAmp .

If the song filenames are correctly titled but all you are getting in the playlist is a bunch of files with ?-? Question marks, let's fix that up now so that you don't have to manually rename every single MP3 later on:



Go to Options / Preferences in the Winamp right-click menu, and select the Plugins / Input branch. There should be a bunch of plugins on the right. Select 'Alpha-II SPC Player v3.05 (x86)' and then press the 'Configure' button.

In the 'Configure SNESAmp' setup box, select the Title tab. You should see a Title Formatting dialogue box with some crap that looks like this: '%9[%8[%8-]%9 ]%3 - %2' . Try deleting all that and simply having %1 .

This will merely display each file as it's actual file name. As long as each file is named and maybe numbered also, it should now be easy to identify each song and keep them in order. You will probably have to remove (not delete) the whole playlist and reload the file / directory for the change to take effect.

Writing to MP3 is pretty simple, you just have to allow the time it takes to encode a whole game soundtrack (5 to 15 minutes on a typical recent computer such as a 3.0Ghz Pentium 4).

Select the 'Chun-Yu's MP3 Writer plug-in v3.0' and select the Configure button. You will be prompted to select your output directory, so locate that and Click OK to arrive at the MP3 Coding Configuration section. Here you might want to Untick 'Joint Stereo' because otherwise having this ticked will cause a mono mix if I remember correctly. Double check the 'Output Filename Formatting' field. There should be a %#. %p in it, but perhaps if the filename itself already has a number on it you may wish to change the field to just %p To avoid having cluttered, redundant MP3 filenames.

This section may be of interested to the musicians / audiophiles of you.

While MIDI versions may not sound as authentic as the SPC format, the advantage is that if you have a notation / compositional program, you can view the musical score, listen to individual instrument tracks and change the tempo.

Handy stuff if you actually want to learn a certain melody on your own instrument - You can listen to an individual instrument in a song on it's own and slow it right down to learn it.

The good news is that ZSNES allows you to mute / unmute individual instruments of the current song actually playing in-game (using the F5-F12 keys), and you can assign speed up / slow down keys to alter the tempo as well.

Even more conveniently is that SnesAmp allows you to do that within Winamp itself with the .SPCs!

The SnesAmp 'skin' can be activated by going into Options / Preferences and selecting the SnesAmp plugin and clicking Configure.

Select the 'Other' tab, tick the box that is labelled 'Display the control dialogue' and press Apply / OK.

Back in Winamp, it's best to have the whole folder of songs loaded in the playlist window so that when the SnesAmp skin is activated you can still change tracks and play/pause.

Selecting an SPC file and playing it should automatically change the main WinAmp window to the SnesAmp 'skin'. To go back to normal, Right-click somewhere in the purple logo on the side and select Disable. Unfortunately you have to go through preferences and configure if you want to activate it again.

Note: SnesAmp may come up with a message when you deactivate it, saying it can be reactivated by going to the plugin configuration under the 'Mixing' tab. This doesn't seem to be correct, at least not in the version I have. Instead, it is under the 'Other' tab.

If the SnesAmp window doesn't seem to activate when you play a file, try exiting and reloading Winamp, and double-check that the box is ticked in the plugin's config.

Just keep in mind that this won't work with the .MP3 versions, or with any other audio format you may convert the songs to. So don't go deleting the SPC's just yet!