Mar 09, 2023, 16:23 pm
Hi, fellow pirates.
I made a post a while back in the general discussion part of the forum about how to better package DOS games when uploading torrents, to save HDD space and bandwidth. The way I went about it is to use a Bash script I created. It's made for Linux, but there's nothing really specific in it that would stop it from also working in FreeBSD or macOS. The only thing that would need to get changed, as far as I'm aware, is the path in the 'cue_tmp' variable, as /dev/shm is a RAM disk device specific to Linux. Though, in the case of macOS, you'd need to also install a recent version of Bash as their version was ancient last time I checked. It doesn't have support for some of the "newer" Bash features that the script uses.
Since I made that post, I've made improvements to the script that makes it more relaible and faster. As an example, it can now process CUE sheets that contain multiple BIN files (as is the case with Redump disc images), if you use the '-ffmpeg' or '-sox' argument to the script.
If you're not on any kind of *nix-based OS, there's also a similar tool called CBAE for Windows, that accomplishes the same job as my script.
In any case, the script can also be used for extracting game OSTs in general. It doesn't matter if the game is PC or console, as long as it has CD audio (which a lot of games did during the 90s and early 2000s).
I think it would be good for the pirate community to have easier access to game OSTs in high quality (FLAC). After extraction, that music can be posted to YouTube or collections could be made and posted on torrent sites (like TPB).
If you have BIN/CUE disc images for old games laying around, you could easily extract the audio tracks in FLAC with the script. It only takes ~10 seconds per game, if using the '-flac' argument.
![[Image: Screenshot-from-2023-02-26-16-25-36.png]](https://i.ibb.co/qgRMH8k/Screenshot-from-2023-02-26-16-25-36.png)
I made a post a while back in the general discussion part of the forum about how to better package DOS games when uploading torrents, to save HDD space and bandwidth. The way I went about it is to use a Bash script I created. It's made for Linux, but there's nothing really specific in it that would stop it from also working in FreeBSD or macOS. The only thing that would need to get changed, as far as I'm aware, is the path in the 'cue_tmp' variable, as /dev/shm is a RAM disk device specific to Linux. Though, in the case of macOS, you'd need to also install a recent version of Bash as their version was ancient last time I checked. It doesn't have support for some of the "newer" Bash features that the script uses.
Since I made that post, I've made improvements to the script that makes it more relaible and faster. As an example, it can now process CUE sheets that contain multiple BIN files (as is the case with Redump disc images), if you use the '-ffmpeg' or '-sox' argument to the script.
If you're not on any kind of *nix-based OS, there's also a similar tool called CBAE for Windows, that accomplishes the same job as my script.
In any case, the script can also be used for extracting game OSTs in general. It doesn't matter if the game is PC or console, as long as it has CD audio (which a lot of games did during the 90s and early 2000s).
I think it would be good for the pirate community to have easier access to game OSTs in high quality (FLAC). After extraction, that music can be posted to YouTube or collections could be made and posted on torrent sites (like TPB).
If you have BIN/CUE disc images for old games laying around, you could easily extract the audio tracks in FLAC with the script. It only takes ~10 seconds per game, if using the '-flac' argument.