How to extract Road Redemption's soundtrack

A guide that explains how to extract Road Redemption's music from the game's resources

Update

I created this guide back in 2014 when Road Redemption was still in early access. The instructions in my guide might be incompatible with the current version.

Introduction

After playing RR for a while I really came to like the soundtrack. Of course I tried to find it readily available in the game's directory, easy to move over to my music library. That was not the case.
When researching the matter further, I also found that no-one on Steam or elsewhere seems to have explained where exactly the music is and how to get at it.
I also could not find the soundtrack by itself anywhere on its own at the moment, except as part of the game's $70 Special Edition.
Enough motivation to get the soundtrack!

Prerequisites

Before we can continue, we should make sure that we bought Road Redemption, activated it to our Steam account and installed it.
Now we visit the following thread on the ZenHAX forum, a "Free Game Research and Security Community" where we can find the Unity Assets Explorer ("UAE") made by Haoose et al.
http://zenhax.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=36

We download the program from Dropbox or the attachment and extract it using 7-zip[www.7-zip.org] (open source software) or WinRAR[rarlabs.com] (shareware). You should now have these files, if you downloaded the attachment in the thread:

Before proceeding further, we upload the .exe file on http://virustotal.com to see if it is recognized by any antivirus scanners as malicious just in case.

Extracting the music

We open the UAE which looks like this.

We click on the button at the top saying "Open Assets-file." In the opened window we navigate to where Road Redemption is installed, usually under C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\RoadRedemption\. We open the subdirectory RoadRedemptionEarlyAccess_Datawhere we see these files.

First we open resources.assets which then looks like this.

We enter ".ogg" into the search field below the list which takes us to where the music is among the many files. The first item is #1461, resources/DroptheHammer1.ogg. With a little scrolling and using [Shift] + Click, we can highlight all files with the ogg file extension which are right below DroptheHammer1. After highlighting them all, we right-click somewhere on the highlighted files and choose "Extract This Files" (yes, bad English) from the context menu.

You can see the extraction progress in the bottom window. After everything is done, you will see this message.


Almost done. Only two more tracks to do. Open the other .assets files just like the previous one and use the search to find and extract these files:

• sharedassets0.assets: pretty killer_fadeIn.ogg
  
• sharedassets6.assets: rainbowRoad.ogg

If we see the following error message
we fix it by just quitting and restarting UAE.

UAE saves the files in the directory where you downloaded/extracted it to. Move all the files into a single directory, for example "Road Redemption OST" to make things more organized. If you did everything as described here, you should now have these 30 files:

Halloween update

A couple more tracks were added to the game on October 30th 2014. Also extract these files from resources.assets:
AlScare.ogg
Devils_Chorus.ogg
FearTwentyPercent.ogg
ghostTechnoDream.ogg
labry.ogg
Scary.ogg

Technical aspects and limitations

Codec

The music you just extracted from the game's assets is encoded with the OGG Vorbis codec[en.wikipedia.org] codec at about 120kbit/s.
Your phone might not support this format. I recommend foobar2000 to convert the files to mp3. (Recommended format: lame, MP3 VBR, V5) There are probably other guides for this.

While the quality of these files is alright, it is far from perfect. I used Audacity to look at a spectrogram of one of the tracks and the low quality is apparent. The cutoff at about 16 kHz means the quality is similar to a 128 kbit MP3 which is about the quality of a webradio stream, but not of a high fidelity audio recording. This screenshot compares an HD remix of Road Redemption's menu music posted on Youtube by "HD Mixes" here (top) with the track we just extracted (bottom).

Missing metadata

The files extracted here include neither the name of the artist(s) nor track numbers, production year, etc. There are only the somewhat descriptive filenames.
Presumably, both the issue of the audio quality as well as missing tags are not an issue in the soundtrack that is offered as part of Road Redemption's Special Edition.
Unfortunately Road Redemption's shop page or the Humble Store have no further details about the soundtrack.

Declaration

I believe that this extraction process as well as explaining it fall under fair use.

This guide should only be available on Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=323041080

[Zoukambada]

Maybe someone can replace the current music with the Road Rash Soundtrack using this tutorial to update and repack unity assets:
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/105849-tutorial-how-to-edit-assets-and-assetbundles/

All Mega Drive / Genesis Soundtrack faithfully remade by Dean Harris (very good!)
https://deanharriscomposer.com/
https://www.patreon.com/DeanHarrisComposer
https://www.youtube.com/@DeanHarrisComposer/playlists
https://soundcloud.com/search?q=Dean%20Harris%20Road%20Rash

[MOHAX]

For those who were not helped by this method:
Downloads this: AssetsBundleExtractor (Sorry urls removed)
1.Unpack archive
2.Open folder and run AssetBundleExtractor.exe
3.Go to File/Open
4.Select globalgamemanagers in folder Games\Road Redemption Revengers Assemble\RoadRedemption_Data
5.Select "Type" twice
6.Select all files of type "AudioClip"
7.Select "Plugin" and "OK"
8.Choose a location to save "WAV" files
Enjoy! All sounds and tracks.
You can find music through the filter by the duration of the tracks, those that are more than 3 minutes will be higher, and further down in decreasing time, these are sounds.

[Mark]

Do not think this works for the latest version. Tried extracting RoadRedemption_Data assets files, but UAE (version 1.5) is unable to open any of them. Gets stuck and reports a ridiculous amount of files, like sharedassets10.assets -> FILES=1817102983

Opening assets files in RoadRedemption_Alpha assets files works fine, and can extract data from those.

Anyone knows if there is another way to extract the soundtrack? Or perhaps devs could offer a release of mp3 files...

[+]

Awesome guide thank you! Can this utility/program be used to extract soundtracks from other games too? I have a number of games I would love to extract the sound track from.

[Noraim]

Following the instructions given, the search turns up empty when trying to look up .ogg files.

After some lengthy scrolling, seems all file names/extensions are numerical, with the exception of .mat files, which are something else unrelated.

The only thing that makes sense to my inexperienced eye in UAE are file extensions .83 (AudioClip) and .11 (AudioManager) which seem related to the soundtracks or sounds in general.

Going to test this and see if I can fumble around 'till I find them.

[alfadeltafox]

muito bom ba hora

[Capt_Blakhelm]

Some of the tracks I want are in a Youtube video, but I think many of the tracks from the current game are still not easy to get.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpzWCWJ9ukI

[Capt_Blakhelm]

I hate to be the guy, but would anybody be willing to upload the .ogg's (or .mp3s) somewhere? I've tried both UAEs from the guide and the comments and both of them crash when trying to open the files.

I've found some music on Youtube, but I think they are tracks from an older version of the game, and I want the tracks in the 1.0 release. Only one I found online was: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9wLWLHFKTE

Maybe I need to get Unity itself to open these files...

[Seven_dede]

Hi, I do your method to extract theses files but:
-all songs are now in 1.83 extension
-if I want to extract it, I can't and I have: Stream read error.

Have you got a solution?

[praetor_alpha]

Thanks, there's some good stuff in the soundtrack. It seems that there are some in there that aren't used yet. Hopefully the devs will offer this as a separate purchase somewhere. (if you're reading this Ian, FLAC please!)