Bulk BWAV to WAV Converter

A project that aims to convert BWAV (binary wave audio) files, specifically in the Nintendo format, to WAV (wave audio) files in a bulk/batch procedure.

My simple addition to this is just a wrapper script around the absolutely brilliant ic-scm/openrevolution project (which aims to provide a handy tool to convert video game audio to playable formats), in which itself implements the amazing work of Gota7 and their exploration and subsequent brain-dump of the Nintendo Binary Wave Audio format.

There is nothing smart going on in this repo, if anything its saving you a few minutes writing a for loop in bash.

Requirements

There shouldn't be any, beyond having the g++ build tool installed and exposed on your PATH, as required by ic-scm/openrevolution to build the brstm_converter binary that this project uses.

Make sure when you clone the repo to do so with sub modules, otherwise this project will not work. This as this project will build the required underlying brstm_converter binary from the ic-scm/openrevolution repo.

Setup

Make sure when you clone the repo to do so with sub modules, otherwise none of the below will work. This as this project will build the required underlying brstm_converter binary from the ic-scm/openrevolution repo.

There is a makefile at the root of this project which aims to cover most of the project orchestration for you.

Firstly, we need to build that brstm_converter binary and get the project set up:

make setup

If you for whatever reason need to reset the repo, which reverts anything the make setup did above:

make reset

Usage

1. Place any *.bwav files that you have in the in directory at the root of the project.
2. Run make convert.
3. Depending on how many files you have, this could be over in an instant or take several minutes, so find something to pass the time.
4. All converted *.wav files will be output to the out directory with the same file name as the source *.bwav file, just with the *.wav extension instead.

Quickly organise the output files

Once all of your converted files reside within out/*.wav it can be a pain to sort through the large amount of files that there are, often 20,000+.

That's where the next command, make organise, comes in.

This will run through all of the output files and organise them into the following aptly named directories:

• out/Less than 5 seconds
• out/Less than 15 seconds
• out/Less than 30 seconds
• out/Greater than 30 seconds

This should allow you to more easily find what you're looking for.

This does require ffmpeg to be installed and available on your $PATH, as it uses ffprobe to query the duration of the file from the metadata.

On macOS, this can easily be achieved via brew: brew install ffmpeg.

macOS Finder quirkiness

Again, Apple hiding away features via 'intuitive' design. macOS will only display audio based columns in Finder's list view if the parent directory is named Music.

So, my advice is to drop all the converted *.wav files into a new Music directory (you can quickly create one in the out directory), then right click on the list headers and select 'Duration' under the newly presented column options. This trick also works with naming 'Movies' and "Photo's" to reveal more options for dealing with video and photo file specific sorting options.

This is far from the most 'intuitive' design and crazy that its limited by parent directory name.

Quick guide for audio/sound/music asset backups from NSP's

This is purely for backup purposes and should only be done using legal cartridges you own.

1. Make sure Yuzu is setup and installed on your machine.
   • This is by far the easiest method, after I went down many ancient forum posts and archived GitHub repos trying to chase down an up to date resource.
   • Finally ended up seeing a YouTube video just saying 'use Yuzu'. Sure enough, its a right click option in Yuzu...
2. From within Yuzu, right click the game (that you've legally backed up from your cartridge and imported into Yuzu) you wish to backup the audio/sound/music assets for and click 'Dump RomFS' > 'Dump RomFS'.
3. On the popup window, select 'Full'.
   • Selecting 'Skeleton' will simply dump the folder structure only, which is useful for quickly seeing if there is a directory you like the look of.
   • There is no option to customise the dump location, it will dump into a dumps folder in the Yuzu application directory and it will automatically open it when its complete.
4. It will take a little while to dump.
   • For reference;
     • A 5900X with NVMe storage, it took about 5 minutes.
     • It was a similar time on my M1 Pro machine.
     • Depending on the game, the resulting dump can be in the 10's of gigabytes.
5. Once complete, it will open the dumped NSP RomFS contents location with your OS's file explorer.
   • This is placed into a dumps directory parented by the game ID within the Yuzu application directories.
   • From here you can then navigate and find any audio/sound/music assets you wish to backup.