[Tutorial]: Extracting music from the DJ Booth and other instruments.
I've seen quite a few threads asking about this, and after some research (and A LOT of testing) I successfully extracted all the DJ Booth tracks, piano songs etc.
I searched everywhere for a similar tutorial but I couldn't find any so I decided to make one myself.
This tutorial is frankly quite easy, however this method will require a bit of time, patience and A LOT of trial and error.
Note, that this is my very first tutorial, I'll try be as detailed and as thorough as I can so,
PLEASE read everything carefully. .
What you will NEED:
1. SimPE 2. Xantippe (a tool in order to convert the extracted audio files) I couldn't find the link in the original website, fortunately it's still up here on MTS:
http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=40438&page=3
LOCATE THE APPROPRIATE FILES
Step 1:
Open up SimPE, and click
File -> Open (top left corner)
Step 2:
Locate where your
The Sims 2 game is installed.
If you have The Sims 2 / The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection installed through Origin, you’ll need to figure out where Origin installs your games by going to: Origin > Application Settings > Advanced > Downloaded Games.
The default location for The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection is: Program Files/Origin Games/The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection. (This is what version I'm going to be using for this tutorial.)
Step 3
Now, finding the appropriate files, will depend on what exactly you want to extract. For example if you want to extract music from the DJ Booth, you will need to go to Nightlife's directory (because this is the EP the DJ Booth came with) which is:
The Sims 2 -> Double Deluxe -> EP2 -> TSData -> Res -> Sound. All kinds of music, soundtrack, SFX etc. is included in this folder.
Step 4
The way the music of the DJ Booth/Instruments is formatted, is
different from the music you hear in the Radio or CAS/Build/Buy mode. The tracks are actually considered as sound effects instead of music, which means the sounds we want to extract are burried within all the other sound effects found within the game. However there is some "sort" of workaround to make our lives a little bit easier.
So, the files that contain the sound effects are
SFX1 and
SFX2. The DJ Booth's tracks, are contained in the SFX1 file so open that up in SimPE. (To find out which one of the 2 files contains the tracks you want, will require some testing. More on that later.)
You should come up with a bunch of different files. Click on the
"mp3 or xa sound file" tab on the column all the way to left.
Step 5
Now double click, the
"Size" column all the way to the right. This will sort all files, from
larger to smaller. Usually music files are
longer, thus
larger than other sound effects (footsteps for example.)
Because we double clicked the
"Size" column, the larger files are at the top, meaning our music files should be somewhere around there.
Unfortunately there is no way to know for sure what each file contains, so we will have to export all of the files at the top and after we are done converting we will be able to delete the unwanted files (if there are any.)
EXTRACTING THE FILES
Step 6
Here comes the
tedious and
VERY IMPORTANT part.
The files we want to extract
NEED to be extracted in a .xa format. That would be fine, however
SimPE will not allow us to pick an extension when we extract multiple files. That means we need to extract each file
1 by 1 and rename them to end in a
.xa extension. With that said,
right click the very first file (at the top), and click
extract.
A window will appear asking you where to save. Click on the drop-down menu and choose
All Files. Rename your file to whatever you want, but
make sure it ends in a .xa extension
Repeat this step for all the files you want to extract!
Step 7
Go to where you exported your file(s). You can safely delete the XML Document files if you want (so the page won't get cluttered up.)
Now open up
Xantippe. It will immediately ask you to
open a .xa file, so go to where you extracted your file(s), select the first file on the list (if you have many) and choose
open.
Another window will pop-up asking you where to save it. Choose a location and a name and click
save.
Lastly, a last window will appear make sure to
hit the decode button.
If everything goes according to plan, you should receive this message:
Click OK, and test your decoded file! Congrats!!!!! You just extracted and decoded your first file :D
Now you need to decode every file you have extracted from SimPE.
FINAL NOTES
~~~So like I mentioned above the files we want will be contained either in the
SFX1 file, or the
SFX2 file. If you are looking for a specific instrument's music, open up the SFX1 file first, and after double clicking the
"Size" column,
extract a couple of
random files from around the top area. (Don't bother going to the bottom because these are very small files that contain SUPER short sound effects.) Usually the instrument music files are about the
same size with each other, so if you happen to extract a violin song from SFX1 that means that the violin songs are all in that file. It requires some trial and error but it works.
~~~I also found some instrument files in the
MISC package file (found within the University directory.) I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to me like these are the band sounds from all the instruments together. I'll need to do some more testing to see where everything is.
So yeah that's pretty much it!