Importing raw files into audacity gives a lot of clipping

[bartvbl]

Hi,
I am trying to import some game music from an old game of mine.
I have found out that the data type is VOX ADPCM.
The only problem is that when I import it, the sound is terribly clipped.
Is there a way of importing the file with a bit less gain?
(Audacity 1.2 latest, Audacity 1.3 beta. Same thing happens in both versions. OS: Windows Vista SP2)

[kozikowski]

You might need to convert the music to straight WAV so Audacity understands it. Foobar2000 is a good converter program as are Super and Switch. The desperation method is to record the computer playing the sound.

The wiki seems to be down. I'll get back with this.

Koz

[bartvbl]

I tried the tools, 2 of them didn't support vox files (Foobar2000 and Super)
Switch did support VOX files, but the result was even more clipped than when I would import it into Audacity.
Converting it to WAV is actually the thing that I try to accomplish with these files: they are a bit old, and since I like the tunes I'd like to be able to listen to them later on.

[kozikowski]

<<<Switch did support VOX files, but the result was even more clipped than when I would import it into Audacity.>>>

Audacity is a terrible converter. You almost always want to do your converting outside and then open the results in Audacity for editing. You know you got everything working when you don't have to "Import" music. You can just open the song.

One note. Do the songs sound clipped, appear clipped on the blue waves (all the way up and down) or both? I have had times when Audacity presented a song to me horribly distorted and the blue waves were correct. I restarted Audacity and the problem went away.

If we haven't yet, we need to urge you over to Audacity 1.3.12. Audacity 1.2 is horribly old and arthritic and isn't always up to production jobs any more.

http://audacityteam.org/download/

Koz

[bartvbl]

The songs sound and appear clipped (so the blue waves pretty much take up all the way from the bottom to the top).
Also, when I press view > show clipping, the whole song becomes red, except for a few stireps here and there.
I tried to do the same thing in both audacity 1.2 and 1.3 beta, which gave pretty much the same results.

I attached some screens showing what the imported song looks like.
And the result from trying some other tools: Audacity is not bad at all at importing these VOX files, since many of the other programs seem to make them even more clipped that audacity does.

[steve]

I have found out that the data type is VOX ADPCM.

How did you find that out? There are other types of ADPCM as well as VOX ADPCM.
I've tried several options using Sox but without knowing the exact format it's just guesswork and no success so far.

[bartvbl]

I thought it was vox because it seemed to be the format that gave the best reconstruction of the original music.
It was mostly guesswork indeed.
I guess the problem is that I am a complete newbie at these kind of things (I hadn't heard of ADPCM in the first place a few days ago).
I'll take a look around, see if I can find something that reconstructs it better
Just to know:
what other kinds of ADPCM are around?

[steve]

what other kinds of ADPCM are around?

"Microsoft ADPCM", "IMA ADPCM", "Dialogic ADPCM", "G721", "G726" and "G727" are some that I've heard of - there's probably a lot more.

Your file certainly appears to be some flavour of ADPCM, but further than that I've no idea.

An alternative approach would be to Google for a program to rip the sound from the game, or see if the soundtrack is already available.

[bartvbl]

IMA seems to be the standard kind of ADPCM, and Microsoft made its own version of that that they named Microsoft IMA ADPCM, which they happen to use in wav files a lot.
But it is hard to find anything about possible file extensions, which I could use to try it on sox (http://sox.sourceforge.net/).
The first bytes of the file, which usually gives some info about the file type says "ALP". I haven't found anything so far that seems to fit to these letters.
Probably people that tried before me gave up eventually, as I haven't found anyone posting the music online
I'll keep trying.

[waxcylinder]

Do you have anyway of playing the music? Do you for instance still have the game and will that let you play the music?

If so you should be able to record it with Audacity. It will have the disadvantage of going Digital to Analog (when yoo play it ) and then back to digital again when you record it in Audacity - buut it would be a way of getting the music.

WC