Kotor II [StreamSounds] .wav files impossible to open/play/decompress

[SpookyExperiments]

Hi there,

 

I recently began modding The Sith Lords and have had great success with small, easy personal mods. I'm now expanding my horizon and attempting to get to next tier of modding abilities.

 

I've had great interest in a .wav file ever since I played Kotor II on XBox in 2004. Specifically, it is the ambient audio track looping in the corner of the bar in the Entertainment Promenade on Nar'Shaddaa. It's a boss riff. It is not a music file on the OST or in the StreamMusic folder. Rather, it is a (corrupt?) .wav file within the StreamSounds folder and (I am assuming this actually considering I've listened to every music file to try and find it) I believe it's titled either al_club_beat* (*1 or 2) or possibly al_bar_beat3. However, I cannot open this file to listen and confirm, let alone do anything to mod it.

 

I have spent the past 6 hours scouring the internet reading everything I can about file extensions, decoders, decompressing, and all the forums threads even remotely close to this issue. I have downloaded and installed all of the programs others have used (Nero, Miles Sound Studio, VLC, etc, etc) to manage the StreamMusic files, yet I still cannot even play the .wav sound effect files. Not a single one. Miles and Nero can't even decompress them.

 

Has anyone even figured out yet what the deal is with the StreamSounds files? What the heck did Obsidian do to them? I'm running out of ideas here. It seems like they encoded them or compressed them so much they are impossible to open/use/edit. I am desperately hoping to find a way to play any .wav file from the StreamSounds folder at this point.

 

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

I'll be posting this on other Kotor/Tsl mod forums.

 

Thank you.

[JCarter426]

The sounds in StreamSounds are compressed in a different format that is, as far as I know, currently unknown. The majority of the game's sound effects can be extracted with KOTOR Tool (BIFs -> sounds.bif) but I believe that specific one is not there.

[SpookyExperiments]

I believe I stumbled upon a thread on another website where you state pretty much the same thing. The part of me that does not want to give up believes there' s an answer somewhere out there on the web. The other part is really salty towards Obsidian for doing God knows what to the files.

[SpookyExperiments]

The sounds in StreamSounds are compressed in a different format that is, as far as I know, currently unknown. The majority of the game's sound effects can be extracted with KOTOR Tool (BIFs -> sounds.bif) but I believe that specific one is not there.

 

I've spent the last couple hours or so extracting .wavs from the list of sound.biffs provided by KOTOR Tool and have been comparing them to the .wavs in SoundStreams. So far, I have not found a match of sound files anywhere. It's as if the files in KOTOR Tool don't even exist in the game itself. There are 800+ files in SoundStreams and just by looking there seems to be about the same amount under sounds.biff, yet a good chunk of them don't even exist in the game folder.

[JCarter426]

There are 2,265 files in sounds.bif. Wouldn't surprise me if StreamSounds is merely supplemental. I see all of the combat sounds, which are probably needed because the soundset files reference them, and a lot of area sounds which I would guess are needed because UTS files reference them. The lack of these files in sounds.bif is likely an oversight.

[SpookyExperiments]

Well after a serious regimen of caffeine, trial and error, and some hair pulling, I've actually figured out how to import/open/play/edit/mix any file from the infamously elusive [streamSounds] folder in the Kotor2 directory.

 

It's actually really simple.

 

I'm going to end this thread and create a new one to outline the process.