Ripping game audio

Want to rip audio from game with high quality? Look no further!
Images for noob friendliness. Also works with re;birth 2!

Opening

Some time ago I tried to rip audio from game called Unholy Heights. Game stored audio in .xwb files which seemed to have pretty good unpackers available. Sadly game had audio in some weird format which I couldn't open at all.

However it seems like same trick does work with this title and every audio is listenable. I want to thank AstralWanderer who made this post at GOG forums[www.gog.com].

This is my very first quide and some stuff are pretty familiar to me so please do give feedback if something is wrong or not understandable.

Of course anyone is free to simply upload these somewhere on the internet with proper tags, but I won't be the one to do it. I did this mostly for the sake of some form of instructions.

Getting everything we need

First of all, make sure you have downloaded the game. Those are the files we are trying to extract after all.

Download Luigi Auriemmas XWB/ZWB files unpacker (mentioned as unxwb from this point forward): http://aluigi.altervista.org/papers.htm#xbox

If you'd like to preview audio files before conversion, easiest way to do this is with VLC media player: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
Some bigger codec packs contain needed codec as well.

FFmpeg for conversion: https://www.ffmpeg.org/

Ripping audio files

Unzip unxwb somewhere where it's easily accessible, for example root of HDD or desktop.

Navigate to games installation direction, located in <Steam>\steamapps\common\Neptunia Rebirth1
We need two files from data folder: SOUND.xsb and SOUND.xwb, .xsb contains name data for files and .xwb contains audio itself.

Copy those two files to unxwb folder.

Now to fun part. Open command line to unxwb folder. Easiest way is to Shift+right click and selecting "open command line here" but you can also alternatively go old school opening cmd.exe and typing "cd C:\path\to\unxwb"

Now we need offset data for filenames, this can be easily determined with hexeditor.

So command to run in command line is following:

unxwb.exe -b SOUND.xsb 645314 SOUND.xwb

This takes a while and shows following when finished:

And you should have folder full of WAV files in ADPCM format:

Converting ripped audio

Right now it's really hard to listen audio files and many players simply refuse to play them or play them pitched. You can review those with VLC as there are 15245 files it would be wise to check what files you want to convert more convinient format.

Now unzip FFmpeg to unxwb folder and open up and open ff-prompt.bat.

For example if you'd like 00000000.wav to 192kbps MP3 file you'd give following command:

ffmpeg -i ..\00000000.wav -b:a 192K ..\00000000.mp3

-i tells which file to use as input, ..\ tells to use parent folder where all .wav files are, -b:a tells what bitrate to use and lastly what file and format file will be written. To know more how to use FFmpeg refer to their website[www.ffmpeg.org] or type ffmpeg -h

After giving that command you should now have regular high quality audio file at your disposal. GZ! :fhappy:


Want to convert all everything? Open up your preferred text editor, paste the following to it, save as whatever.bat to same folder as everything else. Double clicking saved files should start to convert every .wav file as 192kbps mp3 file under mp3 folder and prompt you to press any button when all's done.

mkdir mp3
for %%f in ("*.wav") do bin\ffmpeg -i "%%f" -b:a 192k "mp3\%%~nf.mp3"
pause

Thanks gueldore for commenting.

Re;Birth2 Sisters Generation

This should work exactly the same with second game. Only difference is offset value for names:

unxwb.exe -b SOUND.xsb 849174 SOUND.xwb

Re;Birth3 V Generation

Seems to also work with third game (thanks for commenting) and again, only difference is offset.

unxwb.exe -b SOUND.xsb 1168830 SOUND.xwb

[8Yaron8]

Hmm, it's bad that the sound effects cannot be extracted, if they are extracted, then they are corrupted and cannot be played. I wanted to use these sounds in my animation.

[BuIlDaLiBlE]

You can't "do it in reverse", but probably something can be done with NepTools.

[Blanc (Next White)]

Will this work for MDN VII (MegaDimension Neptune VII) as well? Also if I insert my own music to replace the game's music (MDN's music), do I simply do all of this in reverse?

[BuIlDaLiBlE]

Great tutorial, but now I wonder if there's a way to get loop points info :P

[Nepgear]

You can just find the music in the game files, you don't need to do this. I might make a different guide on how to find the game's files to find the music folder.

[Deses]

@Mairo oh, I see now. Thanks for the extra tips.

[Mairo the bear]

@Deses, this tutorial is old and I was extremely noob. Make sure you download windows binary and not linux one, then open command prompt in "bin" folder and everything works similarly.

[Deses]

Well shucks. In RB2 this works perfectly for SOUND.xwb and SOUND_E.xwb, but SOUND_S.xwb outputs nothing but unidentified codec files.

"Now unzip FFmpeg to unxwb folder and open up and open ff-prompt.bat."
How? Leaving aside that it comes in a .tar.bz2 file which is far from the everyday zip, rar or 7z file, there is no ff-prompt.bat inside

[IER]

Btw, the offset for the jp_event.xwb file (which incidentally is almost twice and a half larger than the us_event one) is 498550 , while the jp_bonus.xwb character's audio file is 9202 .

[IER]

I freaking did it lol. I extracted Megadimension VII's BGM. 10 minutes ago I didn't even know what Hex was (like, I suppose, most people here) but just by looking closer and eye-analyzing things, I got the offset myself yay. It is 4018 . So, if you wanna extract Megadimention's BGM, you'll need the BGM.xsb and BGM.xwb in the unxwb folder and follow the guide in this page. What you'll have to type in the command line is:
unxwb.exe -b BGM.xsb 4018 BGM.xwb