MM8BDM Forum
NES Sound Effects, and Where to Find Them
MusashiAA • June. 1, 2024, 11:33 PM
Byeah.
June. 1, 2024, 11:33 PM
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TLDR;
While 8BDM mods do not require everything to be in style with the NES look, using NES sound effects goes a long way into a more cohesive experience when making content for this game. As having worked with sound effects for a long time, I think it'd be ideal if I at least make a simple thread where I highlight what I normally have done, and what I use to do so.
Simply put, there's two ways to go about it: finding an existing one from an NES game, or editing one/making one from scratch. I use NSF rips of NES videogames for scouting already existing sound effects, and an ancient modded version of Famitracker called NSFImport, which allows you to import NSF sequence data into Famitracker, and then edit it.
You may find NSF rips all over the internet, if you know where to look. My go-to choice was eventually The Wizard himself, MrNorbert1994's gigantic library of NSF rips. His work to rip/collect almost every existing rip of every NES game is monumental and unparalleled, and best of all, they come with their sound effects indexed! You may peruse this enormous library and-
Wait, you need something to play these audio files! There's a lot of different NSF players out there , some ancient and some new. Generally, I use VirtuaNSF to play them back. It's an old one, but also incredibly lightweight and simple to use. This way, you can play all these NSF files and scout for any sound effect you'd like.
Now, "ripping" them can be done in many different ways. You could record them with a different program off VirtuaNSF (the program itself even comes with its own WAV exporter). But the point here is to be able to edit them in Famitracker. Here is NSF Importer, a modded version of Famitracker 0.4.3 created by rainwarrior, with the very helpful ability to import NSF sequence data into Famitracker's environment. You must take into account the exact track number of the sound effect you want to pull out of the NSF file, the rest of the information asked doesn't really matter much. NSFImport has pattern editing off by default, so that you save the imported data as an FTM file, which can then be edited with a different versions of Famitracker.
I will not be going through a tutorial on how to actually do stuff in Famitracker. You may find some tutorials on YouTube. I will also not be teaching you how to do it the way I do, because I am not a very good teacher and this is years of eyeballing and practice that I cannot compress into a single forum posts. My hope is that, by providing people with the tools that I've used for years, anyone that's interested into getting into this will know what tools to start with.
While 8BDM mods do not require everything to be in style with the NES look, using NES sound effects goes a long way into a more cohesive experience when making content for this game. As having worked with sound effects for a long time, I think it'd be ideal if I at least make a simple thread where I highlight what I normally have done, and what I use to do so.
Simply put, there's two ways to go about it: finding an existing one from an NES game, or editing one/making one from scratch. I use NSF rips of NES videogames for scouting already existing sound effects, and an ancient modded version of Famitracker called NSFImport, which allows you to import NSF sequence data into Famitracker, and then edit it.
You may find NSF rips all over the internet, if you know where to look. My go-to choice was eventually The Wizard himself, MrNorbert1994's gigantic library of NSF rips. His work to rip/collect almost every existing rip of every NES game is monumental and unparalleled, and best of all, they come with their sound effects indexed! You may peruse this enormous library and-
Wait, you need something to play these audio files! There's a lot of different NSF players out there , some ancient and some new. Generally, I use VirtuaNSF to play them back. It's an old one, but also incredibly lightweight and simple to use. This way, you can play all these NSF files and scout for any sound effect you'd like.
Now, "ripping" them can be done in many different ways. You could record them with a different program off VirtuaNSF (the program itself even comes with its own WAV exporter). But the point here is to be able to edit them in Famitracker. Here is NSF Importer, a modded version of Famitracker 0.4.3 created by rainwarrior, with the very helpful ability to import NSF sequence data into Famitracker's environment. You must take into account the exact track number of the sound effect you want to pull out of the NSF file, the rest of the information asked doesn't really matter much. NSFImport has pattern editing off by default, so that you save the imported data as an FTM file, which can then be edited with a different versions of Famitracker.
I will not be going through a tutorial on how to actually do stuff in Famitracker. You may find some tutorials on YouTube. I will also not be teaching you how to do it the way I do, because I am not a very good teacher and this is years of eyeballing and practice that I cannot compress into a single forum posts. My hope is that, by providing people with the tools that I've used for years, anyone that's interested into getting into this will know what tools to start with.