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Field Researcher
Original Poster
#1 Old 20th Jan 2019 at 7:03 PM Last edited by simsi45 : 20th Jan 2019 at 8:02 PM.
Default [Tutorial]: Extracting music from the DJ Booth and other instruments.
I've seen quite a few threads asking about this, and after some research (and A LOT of testing) I successfully extracted all the DJ Booth tracks, piano songs etc.
I searched everywhere for a similar tutorial but I couldn't find any so I decided to make one myself.

This tutorial is frankly quite easy, however this method will require a bit of time, patience and A LOT of trial and error.
Note, that this is my very first tutorial, I'll try be as detailed and as thorough as I can so, PLEASE read everything carefully. .


What you will NEED:
1. SimPE 2. Xantippe (a tool in order to convert the extracted audio files) I couldn't find the link in the original website, fortunately it's still up here on MTS: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=40438&page=3

LOCATE THE APPROPRIATE FILES
Step 1:
Open up SimPE, and click File -> Open (top left corner)



Step 2:
Locate where your The Sims 2 game is installed.
If you have The Sims 2 / The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection installed through Origin, you’ll need to figure out where Origin installs your games by going to: Origin > Application Settings > Advanced > Downloaded Games.
The default location for The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection is: Program Files/Origin Games/The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection. (This is what version I'm going to be using for this tutorial.)

Step 3
Now, finding the appropriate files, will depend on what exactly you want to extract. For example if you want to extract music from the DJ Booth, you will need to go to Nightlife's directory (because this is the EP the DJ Booth came with) which is:
The Sims 2 -> Double Deluxe -> EP2 -> TSData -> Res -> Sound. All kinds of music, soundtrack, SFX etc. is included in this folder.




Step 4
The way the music of the DJ Booth/Instruments is formatted, is different from the music you hear in the Radio or CAS/Build/Buy mode. The tracks are actually considered as sound effects instead of music, which means the sounds we want to extract are burried within all the other sound effects found within the game. However there is some "sort" of workaround to make our lives a little bit easier.

So, the files that contain the sound effects are SFX1 and SFX2. The DJ Booth's tracks, are contained in the SFX1 file so open that up in SimPE. (To find out which one of the 2 files contains the tracks you want, will require some testing. More on that later.)
You should come up with a bunch of different files. Click on the "mp3 or xa sound file" tab on the column all the way to left.



Step 5

Now double click, the "Size" column all the way to the right. This will sort all files, from larger to smaller. Usually music files are longer, thus larger than other sound effects (footsteps for example.)
Because we double clicked the "Size" column, the larger files are at the top, meaning our music files should be somewhere around there.
Unfortunately there is no way to know for sure what each file contains, so we will have to export all of the files at the top and after we are done converting we will be able to delete the unwanted files (if there are any.)






EXTRACTING THE FILES
Step 6
Here comes the tedious and VERY IMPORTANT part.
The files we want to extract NEED to be extracted in a .xa format. That would be fine, however SimPE will not allow us to pick an extension when we extract multiple files. That means we need to extract each file 1 by 1 and rename them to end in a .xa extension. With that said, right click the very first file (at the top), and click extract.



A window will appear asking you where to save. Click on the drop-down menu and choose All Files. Rename your file to whatever you want, but make sure it ends in a .xa extension



Repeat this step for all the files you want to extract!

Step 7
Go to where you exported your file(s). You can safely delete the XML Document files if you want (so the page won't get cluttered up.)
Now open up Xantippe. It will immediately ask you to open a .xa file, so go to where you extracted your file(s), select the first file on the list (if you have many) and choose open.



Another window will pop-up asking you where to save it. Choose a location and a name and click save.
Lastly, a last window will appear make sure to hit the decode button.



If everything goes according to plan, you should receive this message:



Click OK, and test your decoded file! Congrats!!!!! You just extracted and decoded your first file :D
Now you need to decode every file you have extracted from SimPE.

FINAL NOTES
~~~So like I mentioned above the files we want will be contained either in the SFX1 file, or the SFX2 file. If you are looking for a specific instrument's music, open up the SFX1 file first, and after double clicking the "Size" column, extract a couple of random files from around the top area. (Don't bother going to the bottom because these are very small files that contain SUPER short sound effects.) Usually the instrument music files are about the same size with each other, so if you happen to extract a violin song from SFX1 that means that the violin songs are all in that file. It requires some trial and error but it works.
~~~I also found some instrument files in the MISC package file (found within the University directory.) I'm not entirely sure, but it seems to me like these are the band sounds from all the instruments together. I'll need to do some more testing to see where everything is.

So yeah that's pretty much it!
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 21st Jan 2019 at 11:25 AM Last edited by HarVee : 21st Jan 2019 at 11:56 AM.
For those that are wondering, .XA files are compressed .WAV files. .XA is an extension of the EA ADPCM codec, which in turn is a derivative of the traditional ADPCM codec. However the .XA format is lossy which means data bits do still get removed when it gets compressed into the format, and decompressing an .XA to .WAV will not restore those bits lost. .XA format was commonly used by Maxis, EA, and their other sub-studios in the late '90s and early 2000s era to primarily adapt sound to the PlayStation 1 and 2 consoles while keeping the file size small and still offering better sound quality than a traditional .mp3 formatted file delivers. .XA in terms of sound quality is pretty much the equivalent of .ogg vorbis. Still better than .mp3, but not as good as .WAV.

If you wish to use these files as songs for the radios in TS2, you'll have to convert them to .mp3. The Sims 2 isn't programmed to read .wav or .xa files from the documents folder. Which is stupid IMO.

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