Unknown audio format

[moonraker]

Hi,

I've recently bought GTA: San Andreas, a very fun game. There are some musics from that game I'd like to convert to mp3 or something readable for winamp. The problem is that I don't have any idea of the format used by the game.

There are some files in the game's audio directory with sizes from 60 to 90Mb (the musics of the game are actually radio stations, that explains the size) and I am pretty certain the audio data is stored in these files. But these files don't have any extension. I looked in the game's root directory and saw three files: Ogg.dll, vorbis.dll and vorbisfile.dll... So I tried to read the audio files with the decoders and information tools supplied on vorbis.com, and none works. I tried to play the files in winamp as ogg, wav and mp3, but that doesn't work either. I also tried to open the file in Sony Sound Forge, with no results. When I opened the file in UltraEdit (hexadecimal editor) I noticed that the file starts with about 100 times the same hex sequence... if that can help ?

On doom9's software page, I didn't find any tool to search for the codec of an audio file , so I'm asking you guys what to do ;)

[unskinnyboy]

A little bit of digging around showed me that the audio format which San Andreas uses is indeed OGG, but however no one had any luck so far in playing it outside of the game. :\

However, I don't have a sample of the file to mess around it with it myself. Can you use a file splitter like HJSplit (http://www.freebyte.com/hjsplit/), cut out 1 MB or so of the audio file and make it available for us (upload it to some free hosting site and hotlink here)? I will poke around a bit.

[moonraker]

There you go (http://users.skynet.be/clodius/CR.zip), thank you for trying to help me.

[unskinnyboy]

Nope, no luck with GSpot, EncSpot, Foobar2000.

Couple of related links which explains why it is difficult to convert/extract GTA audio:
http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=194595
http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=195913

[moonraker]

I see. Well, from what I read here (http://www.tinyted.net/eddie/SanAndreasRadio/) , the files I am trying to analyse are in fact archives (like .zip) and the audio is stored in there... Well, too bad. Thanks for your help anyway.

[bond]

try playing it with mplayer, it should handle as good as everything

btw the sample is gone now, would love to get it too

[unskinnyboy]

Here (http://files.bighosting.net/hb52116.rar), I have re-hosted it.

[bond]

absolutely no clue what this could be :D

[unskinnyboy]

lol, but atleast your curiosity is satisfied now.. :D