How to Acquire: The Audio of the Telltale Games

[Bizargh]

DETAILS

Format(s):
- MP3, OGG & WAV

Credits:
- Telltale Games
- Various licensors, publishers and/or collaborators of/for specific games (LucasArts for The Tales of Monkey Island, Skybound Entertainment for The Walking Dead, Gearbox Software for Tales of the Borderlands, etc.)

Music:
- Jared Emerson-Johnson (Main Composer)
- Various artists (Eg. Take Us Back by Alela Diane, In the Water by Anadel, etc.)

Terms of Use:

Originally posted by MattP, Telltale Games Staff:

Hey guys, I want to make everyone aware that while we don't mind fan-made or Let's Play videos, we do not approve of monetizing copywritten material.[telltale.com]

Assume monetisation forbidden across the board. I suspect this is because their games work with and/or use assets from other franchises & artists, which may have Telltale Games following certain guidelines in that regard.

GUIDE

This one's more of a tool recommendation than a guide, but don't be phased. The tools are very easy to use, and the creator provides well written guides for them both on the tool's webpage & with the tool's files if you have any confusion about them.

Ben, of Quick & Easy Software[quickandeasysoftware.net], is a creator of software, mostly tools for exploration, extraction or modification of games made by LucasArts & Double Fine (notably all by or involving Tim Schafer) and, the topic of this discussion, the games by Telltale Games. They are regularly, but unroutinely, updated to support newer releases, so always check for updates.

You can visit the Software[quickandeasysoftware.net] Page of the Site to browse the collection of tools, including the Double Fine Explorer[quickandeasysoftware.net] (Recently updated to support Broken Age), the Monkey Island Music Extractor[quickandeasysoftware.net] & the Psychonauts Explorer[quickandeasysoftware.net], along with various others.

For this, I'm going to recommend the tools I use to extract the sound, music & dialogue from the Poker Night & The Walking Dead games.

The Telltale Explorer[quickandeasysoftware.net]

https://quickandeasysoftware.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/TelltaleExplorer2.png

A program that enables you to extract, view and convert resources from games released by Telltale Games.

It does the following:

• Lets you browse through the game’s files and dump individual files/all files.
  
• Lets you play and dump the audio (music, speech and sfx).
  
• Displays the images as you browse and lets you save them as PNG’s or DDS files.
  
• Decodes and displays the scripts and text as you browse through the files.

It has been designed for the PC versions of the games although it does work with some Wii versions.

Only games that are AT LEAST a year old are supported, this is deliberate (see the readme[quickandeasysoftware.net]).

This is the tool you want to use if you want to explore and/or extract any audio in it's native format such as .VOX or .FSB, which the Music & Speech Extractors provide conversion options for.

The Telltale Music Extractor[quickandeasysoftware.net]

https://quickandeasysoftware.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/TelltaleMusicExtractor.png

A program that enables you to rip the music from all games released by Telltale Games.

In the cases of Poker Night 1 & 2 and The Walking Dead: Seasons One & Two, it also extracts all of the sound effects, and in the case of The Walking Dead, there's a lot. I recommend you make a folder specific for these before you extract, as it extracts every individual file to them, without any folders of their own. Do not worry, as each file is named in a way that's very easy to navigate, sort & arrange, examples such as "mus_loop_Sad_04" ("mus" being short for Music), "imp_Body_hit_07" ("imp" being short for Impact) & "wpn_Rifle_Shot_wet" ("wpn" being short for Weapon).

TIP: The Music Extractor (v1.5.1.3 at the time of writing this) cannot detect the game files by selecting a game's season & episode from the list if they are installed on any other drive than C: .
If you have your Telltale games installed on another drive such as a secondary storage device like E: such as myself or an external storage device, you'll have to manually select the specific game .ttarch or .ttarch2 file that contains the desired audio, which whilst isn't difficult to locate, is named & stored uniquely for different titles such as "<path-to-game>\The Walking Dead\Pack\TheWalkingDead102\3_WalkingDead102_english_pc_ms.ttarch" or <path-to-game>\Tales of the Borderlands\archives\Borderlands_pc_Borderlands102_voice.ttarch2".
So the easiest course of action is to install your desired Telltale game(s) on your C: drive if you don't already to extract your contents with the most convenience.

The Telltale Speech Extractor[quickandeasysoftware.net]

https://quickandeasysoftware.net/screenshots/TelltaleSpeechExtractor.png

A program that enables you to play and rip the voices and SFX from all games released by Telltale Games.

In my experience, it only gets the speech & other voice FX, with the SFX being extracted with the Music Extractor. However, I've only used this with Telltale Games released after 2010, so perhaps the SFX from their older titles such as Sam & Max, Homestar Runner, etc are found this way.

Whilst this tool allows you to browse & extract the dialogue of the Telltale Games with extreme ease, I do not recommend simply extracting all of the voice files, as the vast majority are named only as numbers (as you can see in the "Filename" tab in the image). Instead, I recommend using the Speech Extractor to explore the dialogue you're looking for, then extract the ones you want and allowing you to sort & rename them in whatever way suits you best. You can use "View" to view specific characters such as "Heavy", "Clementine" or "Max" if you're looking for specific character dialogue.