Wing Commander SNES SPC Soundtrack

Wedge009

Rogue Leader
For your information, the Wing Commander SNES SPC soundtrack was released today over at snesmusic.org.

If you don't know what SPCs are, it's the format used for storing Sony SPC700 sound chip memory dumps from a SNES console. The most common way to play it on a PC is with the SNESamp plug-in for Winamp.

It's certainly not the highest quality SNES soundtrack I've ever heard and compared with other versions of Wing Commander, the conversion is pretty low quality overall. Still, for some who started their Wing Commander experience on the SNES, this may hold some nostalgic value for them.
 
As someone who started their Wing Commander experience on the SNES, I can echo that this is indeed a very nice find. I was actually surprised by how nice the sound quality is here.
 
Just realised from the news post: I didn't make it clear that RSNs are just a collection of SPC dumps compressed and packaged with RAR. Any archiver capable of extracting RARs will give you access to the individual SPC dumps (all 64 KiB since that was the size of the SPC700's memory bank) so you can edit the tags as you please. You'll need to use a RAR compressor to repackage it though - SNESamp is hard-coded to only recognise RAR-compressed formats, I think. This is for packages only, of course - the player will still play back individual, uncompressed SPCs.

As for the sound quality, SNESamp can be configured to use high sampling sizes and frequencies, and (subjectively) better interpolation techniques, or if you're really old-school you can configure it to replicate the SNES's sound as closely as possible (16-bit, 32 kHz, Gaussian-interpolated).

I'm glad its release is cause for pleasure among some listeners. Alas, I never had the SNES version, so I don't have the same appreciation for the music conversion. The package does have SNES-exclusive tracks for The Secret Missions, though, which makes it worth at least a download and listen.
 
For all the Apple-Users: You can use Game Music Box for playing these files. And then there is SNESPlayer for the iOS-Devices.

I converted the songs to mp3 and updated the ID3-Tags. Anyone know, when the Unknown Tune (42nd) is being played? It should be on the simulator, but when? Here's the download (151.6 MB):

Click

I converted the files with Game Music Box - I wonder if it sounds different with the WinAmp-Plugin?
 
Actually, Foobar2000 is a nice Media-Player. It's small and fast. And I believe, that the name is a nerdish reference to foo and bar, the two most common variable-names in programming and not a reference to the military expression fubar.

On the other side: I didn't use foobar since... 2003 or so. I don't know, how well it performs today.
 
Evan is right, Foobar2000 is indeed a very nice program.
I used it some time ago and liked it.
 
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