In Castlevania

Hey, a guy I know online requested the first two Castlevania soundtracks in MP3 format, so I converted my NSFs over for him and uploaded them to my space. Since I spent quite a bit of time uploading these for one guy, I figured I'd share with you guys too.

Enjoy!

(192kbps) 18.3mbs

(192kbps) 9.4mbs

Wow! How did you convert from NSF to MP3? I'd love to know what program you used...

I do it quite regularly on my Mac, I use Audio Overload to export the files as AIFF, and then Audacity to trim them into a single loop. then just export as MP3. works great.

Who wants such big mp3s when he can have little handy NSFs?

Why are those so big? not to complain, but any MP3 I've made from an NSF has been under 1MB. although I cut them off after the first loop, and encode at 64kbps, after all, it's just NES music, it gains nothing from being encoded at 320kbps...

They are 192kbps. That should explain why they are so big.
From that I think they are several minutes long and contain the same loop several times.
As Luke said, 64kbps should be enough to get acceptable quality.

Some people don't want the "hassle" of configuring an NSF plugin I guess. I personally still use the NSFs, and I encoded them at 192kbps for him just because I could. I don't cut them off after the first loop because...well, that's not much of a song then. I like at least a minute or two for a song.

Anyway, I do my conversion with the Filewriter Output plugin for Winamp. One step, and I'm ready to burn to CD or upload or whatever I want to do with my MP3s. You can search for it on the Winamp site in their plugins area.

For me it wasn't such a hassle. I put the dll file into the winamp directory and from that time on I could play NSFs automatically...

Yeah, I don't know. He wanted MP3s, not the NSF, so I made them for him. As for the quality issue, ANOTHER person requested Zelda MP3s (posting links in the Zelda forum) and I tried 64kbps, but I could hear audio compression artifacts. I compromised and upped it to 128kpbs, and I couldn't hear a difference. I'm very picky about my audio. 64kbps won't cut it for me, even if it's just NES songs.

Perhaps that guy wanted mp3s because he wants to listen to them in his car or so.

Ha! Yeah, I'm a bit of a dork in that sense. I generally jam some midi video game tunes while checking out the forums... it just keeps the mood of what I'm talking about, I guess I definately want to get some MP3's of these tunes, so I have the originals instead of the one's that other people made. Unfortunately, I don't have WinAmp....

You need an NSF player, and fast. MIDI just doesn't cut it anymore... I used to listen to MIDI files, then I found NSFs, and realized how terrible MIDI really is... just not accurate at all.

Well, I have an NSF player in the form of emulators. You can run them in the background while surfing around, but they tend to break up when a page loads. Another problem is that I like to hear more than just one game. That's why I would like to convert, but don't have the necessary tools. WMP is one of the only things I like about Microsoft, so I'd like to play the tunes through there.

That's true. Same thing with me.
I really liked MIDIs, but when I heard an NSF for the first time I knew what rules.

I tried that but it kept saying something about only recording in 16 bit or something. The way I am doing it now is to use a Windows NSF player like Virtua NSF or Deli Player 2 (both available at Zophars domain) to play the NSFs and then I'm using Blaze Media Pro as audio capture software to record straight from the sound card. Finally, I transfer those into MP3s.

I tried that but it kept saying something about only recording in 16 bit or something. The way I am doing it now is to use a Windows NSF player like Virtua NSF or Deli Player 2 (both available at Zophars domain) to play the NSFs and then I'm using Blaze Media Pro as audio capture software to record straight from the sound card. Finally, I transfer those into MP3s.

Allow me to introduce you to plugin, You can convert anything to anything else. if foobar can play it, foobar can convert it.

What, exactly, are NSFs? I am intrigued, so humor me.

Nintendo Sound Format. Basically an NES ROM with nothing but the audio tracks remaining.

Allow me to introduce you to Foobar 2000 and the foo_gep plugin, You can convert anything to anything else. if foobar can play it, foobar can convert it.

Hey, thanks! Foobar is great. Its probably the best NSF player I've ever used but I cant figure out how to change the playing time of the NSFs. Three minutes is usually fine but when I want to make them into MP3's I'd like to adjust it. I tried to use a .dll editor called XN Resource Editor to adjust the settings on the foo_gep plugin and it showed me that there were menus that could be used to make adjustments but I dont know how to access them.

Oh, also, does any one know where to get an entire NSF collection in one download? The one that was available through the guy, Kevin, who I guess invented NSFs, is down now.

I haven't downloaded it, but that's from a project that's going on at NesDev.

Click File -> Preferences

The expand the "Playback" menu, then the "input" menu.

If you have foo_gep installed properly, you should see an entry for "Game Emu Player" where you can adjust a few settings.

it's not the most configurable NSF player, but it does the job with minimal hassle in a very light media player.