Custom sound files?

[sunnaryt]

I've had a lot of fun lately with graphical overhauls to classic Wii and GameCube titles with high-res textures and such, but I do find the low quality audio somewhat irritating, and I'd love to contribute. So, Is there some way for dolphin to read external audio? I am a music producer of 5 years now so I feel as though I could work on a project like an HD audio overhaul, paired with the texture packs it would be like having an HD version of whatever title.
Perhaps there is a way to convert audio files to .ast and place them inside an ISO with the same names as the file it's replacing?

I have found a tool that converts AST to WAV, I'm not a developer by any means but I'd assume there must be a way for the reverse?

[AnyOldName3]

There are ways to insert custom sounds into games, especially ones that use streamed DTK audio, as with those you can literally just drop a new file in the iso with WiiScrubber or something as you described. other games (or certain sound effects in otherwise doable games) are harder and require quite a bit of reverse engineering, and it's possible that anything done will be of no help whatsoever if you tried to apply it to another game.

[sunnaryt]

There are ways to insert custom sounds into games, especially ones that use streamed DTK audio, as with those you can literally just drop a new file in the iso with WiiScrubber or something as you described. other games (or certain sound effects in otherwise doable games) are harder and require quite a bit of reverse engineering, and it's possible that anything done will be of no help whatsoever if you tried to apply it to another game.

Well mainly I'm interested in Zelda titles and others that are considered classics since I think people should be able to have the best experience possible with them by chance they are just playing them now, or just are enthusiasts. Most things I've seen seem to use the AST or AW format. The idea of a community of sorta bootleg game remasters seems really cool to me, maybe I'll just learn a thing or two to figure this out.  It'd be nice if dolphin had like a load/audio folder or something, while their at it put a load/models to improve geometry lmao but I'm sure that's moving out of legal grey area at that point into definitely illegal unauthorized reproduction.

[AnyOldName3]

As long as custom models/music are made from scratch it should mostly be okay. There's been talk on and off about custom model loading for years, but it's always seemed like too much work, or no one's been able to work out a good way to do it (quite a few games don't treat things as a mesh at a level that Dolphin can intercept stuff, and instead would just show a bunch of disconnected triangles) or it's been put off until certain planned changes to the emulated GPU are implemented (it'd be a bad idea to implement custom model loading only to have it break forever a few days/weeks later).

[sunnaryt]

It would be nice...
I take a deep sigh as I look toward the sky, my mind adrift in a sea of dreams.

[JosJuice]

It'd be nice if dolphin had like a load/audio folder or something, while their at it put a load/models to improve geometry lmao

The closest thing to this that Dolphin has is being able to load an entire folder as a disc image instead of an ISO. It makes it easier to edit files than it would be to replace them inside the ISO, but it's not as convenient as the custom texture loading. You have to fiddle a bit with the settings by setting a DVD root and apploader in the Paths configuration, and then you have to launch the game's DOL.

[sunnaryt]

It'd be nice if dolphin had like a load/audio folder or something, while their at it put a load/models to improve geometry lmao

The closest thing to this that Dolphin has is being able to load an entire folder as a disc image instead of an ISO. It makes it easier to edit files than it would be to replace them inside the ISO, but it's not as convenient as the custom texture loading. You have to fiddle a bit with the settings by setting a DVD root and apploader in the Paths configuration, and then you have to launch the game's DOL.

Yeah, I'll probably attempt that see if I can get it loading different kinds of audio or something just for reference, I like fiddling but I envisioned something I could do that would be easily shared and implemented for other people otherwise it's not worth tackling a project like that for myself.

[AnyOldName3]

If you have simple instructions like "Unpack your iso to this folder, and run this script I wrote which sets everything up and copies the new music into your unpacked iso" then that could work well. I'm not sure of the exact details to run a folder-based game, though.

[sunnaryt]

If you have simple instructions like "Unpack your iso to this folder, and run this script I wrote which sets everything up and copies the new music into your unpacked iso" then that could work well. I'm not sure of the exact details to run a folder-based game, though.

Yeah I've been trying this, I don't think it's connecting the dots when I'm launching dols/wads manually, I set the DVD root to the folder but that's not really doing anything. So I'm not sure either.

[mbc07]

From Game Properties, right click on the disc and choose Extract All (you should use Dolphin to ensure compatibility! Some 3rd party tools I tried before caused issues). Go to Config => Paths, set DVD root to the extracted folder, set Apploader path to the loader file Dolphin extracted in the same folder (you can get it manually from Game Properties too). Now, File => Open, select the .dol file from the disc and if you did everything correctly the game should start normally but from the extracted files instead of the ISO.

I could elaborate a little more, I'm just too lazy at the moment to do proper explanations. If I remember correctly, there's also a small bug in Dolphin that may cause issues in some games when running from extracted dir. Luigi's Mansion is one of them, I think (something related to 8:3 paths pops in the log and the game freezes in a black screen after Nintendo logo and "Press start" screen). Perhaps JosJuice know more about this particular issue?