Where to download classic video game wav files?
May 28, 2010 2:58 PM   Subscribe

I am looking for classic video game sounds and songs to download in wav file format without much luck. Can it be that hard to find these?
posted by Odinhead to Computers & Internet (8 answers total) 9 users marked this as a favorite
 
I wanted the same thing, for ringtones a few years ago. And yes, it was that hard, and I couldn't find them. Which is answering your question directly, albeit not in a particularly helpful way.

You can, of course, take the easy (well, not really) route: download the MAME emulator, find some ROMs and then record the sounds yourself. But this is not necessarily the legal way.

Luckily, lots of "classic" video game compilations are available for various video game platforms if you just have one or two that you really really want.
posted by davejay at 3:04 PM on May 28, 2010


Here's a page of classic video game sound boards. Each game has a downloadable mp3 with a series of sounds from the game. Pretty easy step from there to .wav files.
posted by Babblesort at 3:09 PM on May 28, 2010


There are lots of video game sounds and songs on YouTube, so if you find the relevant game there you could use an online file convertor like Zamzar or Youconvertit to turn it into a wav file.
posted by greycap at 3:11 PM on May 28, 2010


Here are quite a few.

Are you looking for .wav exclusively? Because there are many sites out there where you can get these sounds in .mp3, and with a free sound editor like audacity, you could easily convert them over to .wav.
posted by quin at 3:12 PM on May 28, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks for the responses, looks like I'll go the converter route, although I was trying to avoid it. Thanks for the website Babblesort I had not run across that one.
posted by Odinhead at 3:50 PM on May 28, 2010




If Googling fails, the best bet is to grab the sounds directly from the sound format of the game in question. For example, NES game soundtracks are distributed as an NSF file, which contains the actual music code ripped from the ROM. NSF players will produce accurate and clean output from the file. Usually these files also contain the sound effects from these games, as well as the music. Check out here for a a nice list of sound players and converters for different types of games.

If you use Winamp, you can use one of the Winamp plugins. Change the output device from WaveOut to DiskOut in your preferences, and it will write the file to disk as a WAV.
posted by Herschel at 4:05 PM on May 28, 2010


You can also roll your own with sfxr.
posted by Iridic at 8:54 PM on May 28, 2010


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