pouët.net

Back in the good old days, we had Exotic Ripper for the Amiga, but is there a modern equivilant for the PC? Theres a few demo sound tracks I'd like to get my hands on but they seem to be embedded inside the EXE?

E-mailing the author is probably the simplest way...

kusma: but that's no fun!

you can try kkapture and just select "capture audio".

Them goddamn programmers, hiding soundtracks in guts of their binaries!

What Frost said.

MP3 doesn't really have a veeeery distinct header (sadly), but I did a little dumper some time ago that applied the following principle:
- Look for the first sequence of bytes that could be an MP3 frame header.
- Calculate frame length from that header.
- If next frame (or next two frames) also have valid headers, traverse the file until invalid header is found.
- Dump the data from the first frame to the last into a separate file.
- Goto first step.

Another thing is that some demos has their data packed (in zip or whatever) so it might be good to check that also before doing a search in the data as Gargaj suggested otherwise Gargajs approach is likely the one to take (another thing to notice is that some demos may use ogg vorbis also so you would need to search for that as well)

Doing it the other way is much more interesting: Finding the demo from the MP3!

1) Download the full scene.org archive
2) Build search-database from kkaptured/emulated music dumps.
3) Success

emoon: Then again, "OggS" is easier to find :D

1) find the demo on youtube.
2) youtube downloader, save as .mp3. done ;)

..or just kkapture it.

Because the best thing to happen to a soundtrack is compress, uncompress, kkapture, re-compress. :(

If you ask the author, you can often get it in even better quality than what was shipped with the demo. My solution wins!

Your solution qualifies as social engineering, it's not REAL hacking! >:(

Even better, if it can't be found here, here or here, then it probably isn't worth spending bandwidth on anyway.

This helped me so many times... :)

1) connect your speaker out to line-in or microphone connector
2) record

1) rename .exe to .mp3
2) play it in vobsub until you recognize audio that is actually music

The process Gargaj described is what any streaming-capable mp3-player does anyway.
You can for example put the exe of this into winamp and listen to the track.

What Kusma said. If you're gonna rip out the data, make sure the demo itself doesn't do any noteworthy realtime processing (not common, but it happens).

...there's also the possibility that the zip/rar/whatever data files are password-protected and embedded in the exe, rendering any autodetection tool useless. So, what kusma said.

You can also just hook out the BASS/FMOD calls and save the incoming memory ;)

What Gargaj said :)

So, in other words, nobody has written a tool to do this. Bugger! The principal ideas are nice but ima shite coder so won't be implementing then anytime soon.

Will have to opt for option b, emailing the artist although I do have access to a certain archive which has a fair stack of demo tunes readily available.

While we're on the subject of mp3's I wish more people would bloody tag them!!!

Well, you could just post which demos you're looking into right now and maybe we would be able to help :)