Hi guys,
I read a couple posts here about manipulating .akb files. The long thread for the NFS games seemed to work in the sense that a lot of file altering had to happen to make them work, and even then it was simply to replace files instead of re-encoding them into a different format. The other was for FF Type 0 where the .akb files seemed to have some level of encryption on them and nothing could really be done with them.
I'm trying to work with the sound files from the mobile/steam version of FF6. Someone created a program to read and extract the the files directly from the obb file. All of the sound files are in a .akb format, and from what I read on a discussion on steam the music files are ogg while the sound effects are VOX. I've been able to convert the the files with the ogg data with vgmtoolbox's ogg convert function, but the sound effects are what I'm really after for a project a friend is working on, and I have no idea how to encode these files to a VOX format.
I've attached samples of both the akb with ogg and vox for analysis if anyone can make any progress on these. Thanks in advance for checking it out.
.akb sound effects
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TheMathKing
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Wed Dec 07, 2016 5:59 pm
Re: .akb sound effects
Hi, I am quite interested in what you've done.
I am trying to do a music *SPAM* for FF6, but I can't get the looping to work properly.
I took all the music .akb files using your program, found orchestral music, converted those to .obb, looped them by samples (LoopStart= and LoopEnd=) in audacity, created an .obb that has the same type of content in the file (looked at an .akb file and noticed it only had LoopStart= and LoopEnd= , no authors or comments, etc), took the akb header info for all the files and put them in the new.obb files, renamed file.obb to file.akb, and put them in the game.
The result is that everything works, but the looping doesn't! It loops flawlessly in audacity, but the game doesn't seem to care where I put my LoopEnd=.
Infact, it seems that the akb headers (the part that goes infront of the obb file in a hex editor) contains all the loop information and length information for the song. Without being able to generate those, I can't get things to loop.
Would you be able to help me out with this? You mentioned vgmtoolbox and an ogg convert function, but I couldn't figure out where this is and how to implement it.
Thanks,
Mike
I am trying to do a music *SPAM* for FF6, but I can't get the looping to work properly.
I took all the music .akb files using your program, found orchestral music, converted those to .obb, looped them by samples (LoopStart= and LoopEnd=) in audacity, created an .obb that has the same type of content in the file (looked at an .akb file and noticed it only had LoopStart= and LoopEnd= , no authors or comments, etc), took the akb header info for all the files and put them in the new.obb files, renamed file.obb to file.akb, and put them in the game.
The result is that everything works, but the looping doesn't! It loops flawlessly in audacity, but the game doesn't seem to care where I put my LoopEnd=.
Infact, it seems that the akb headers (the part that goes infront of the obb file in a hex editor) contains all the loop information and length information for the song. Without being able to generate those, I can't get things to loop.
Would you be able to help me out with this? You mentioned vgmtoolbox and an ogg convert function, but I couldn't figure out where this is and how to implement it.
Thanks,
Mike
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mike9k1
- Posts: 11
- Joined: Sat Feb 15, 2020 1:47 am
Re: .akb sound effects
Hey all -- I know this is way old but I thought I would also mirror this thread here in case anyone else comes upon it and needs to modify akb's.
https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3376-post-40627.html#pid40627
Attached is a zip with 2 tools: AKBExtract and AKBReplace
Just place AKBExtract next to your .akb files and run. It should pull the OGG's (basically just removing the header) and place them in the same directory.
For replacement, place your new OGG's next to your .akb's and make sure they are named identical aside from the file extension. Now run AKBReplace. It will look for any "LoopStart" and "LoopEnd" metadata tags present in the OGG and add the correct values to the akb header for looping.
Additional notes are on the page linked above. I don't have stuff for sound effects atm (I may or may not do them), but if I add it, i'll update the package.
https://www.ff6hacking.com/forums/thread-3376-post-40627.html#pid40627
Attached is a zip with 2 tools: AKBExtract and AKBReplace
Just place AKBExtract next to your .akb files and run. It should pull the OGG's (basically just removing the header) and place them in the same directory.
For replacement, place your new OGG's next to your .akb's and make sure they are named identical aside from the file extension. Now run AKBReplace. It will look for any "LoopStart" and "LoopEnd" metadata tags present in the OGG and add the correct values to the akb header for looping.
Additional notes are on the page linked above. I don't have stuff for sound effects atm (I may or may not do them), but if I add it, i'll update the package.