As a reminder, most people wrestling with game audio should be aware of VGMstream, capable of decoding a LOT of native formats.

https://github.com/vgmstream/vgmstream

The best way to use is likely with Foobar2000 https://www.foobar2000.org/download

Edited November 4, 20232 yr by Dark_Ansem

Another useful tip is that if vgmstream isn't able to decode your format immediately, using a .TXTH file (https://github.com/vgmstream/vgmstream/blob/master/doc/TXTH.md) might be the solution to fix it.

For example, I was just trying to play and convert a VSD file from a PS2 game and vgmstream wouldn't decode it. I use Foobar2000 with the vgmstream extension / component to play and re-encode those files to other audio formats.

So in Foobar2000, I could go to File -> Preferences -> Playback -> Decoding -> vgmstream and tick Enable unknown exts.
Then, in the same folder where all my .VSD files were, I created a file named .VSD.txth, with this content inside it (thanks to punk7890 on HCS discord for providing this to me) :

.VSD.txth

codec=PSX
interleave=0x100
sample_rate=44100
channels=2
num_samples=data_size

This makes it so every file with the .VSD extension in this folder will use the proper "header data" from this provided txth file. More example of txth files can be found here.

Then, dragging the same files in Foobar2000 would work, because the txth file in the same folder is providing this extra header data to let vgmstream how to play the file.

I didn't know that!