Pheeel: I was very pleased to be able to buy this game on PC finally, but like many of you I'm disappointed by the music issues which have persisted since this version was originally released.

Having done a little poking around in the game data, It seems that when Capcom made this port, they converted the soundtrack from MIDI to 16 bit WAV files, but no-one apparently accounted for the reverb that is generated internally by the PS1 sound hardware. So what we are hearing in the PC port is essentially the "dry" MIDI output with no effects on top, which makes everything sound very flat and odd.

Theoretically I think it should be possible to just swap out the music files (which are in the DAT folder labelled BGM000 to BGM075) with the versions from the official soundtrack, which should hopefully give a much improved experience! I'm going to give this a go and see how I get on.

nintendo1889: Edit: Audacity can load the BGM.DAT files without issue, tricky part is trying to find what name goes with what track, and then converting the PS1 OST to the right DAT names.

derGott-EiK: would it not be easier just to import it into audacity, add the reverb (that seems to be the main complaint here, it has no reverb) export it as an mp3 and wrap it back into .dat container with ffmpeg?

or do you want to convert the ps1 midis into high quality midi-instruments mp3 to wrap it in dat containers?

most likely the midis on the ps1 discs are in the same order and named the same too.

derGott-EiK: would it not be easier just to import it into audacity, add the reverb (that seems to be the main complaint here, it has no reverb) export it as an mp3 and wrap it back into .dat container with ffmpeg?

or do you want to convert the ps1 midis into high quality midi-instruments mp3 to wrap it in dat containers?

most likely the midis on the ps1 discs are in the same order and named the same too.

Pheeel: Ok, so...I was up most of last night trying to figure this out but unfortunately I think I've hit a brick wall.

My first attempt to switch out BGM001 (which is actually three separate bits of audio appended together, so I had to spend far too long syncing up the relevant files from the soundtrack so they matched the original as far as possible) was unfortunately a complete failure, as it just resulted in a crash to desktop at the point in the game the relevant file is loaded (it's the cutscene where Nina first meets Ryu, the file contains the three pieces of audio that play during the scene). Back to the drawing board.

I was a bit confused why the file I'd saved was so much larger than the original. Turns out they're not actually PCM files at all, as I found when I loaded one into Goldwave they're actually 128k mp3s! I thought I'd made a breakthrough at that point, but putting the mp3 in the DAT folder still results in a crash. I then wondered if it might be due to differing file length, as the replaced version had a tiny amount of silence at the end. Corrected this so both files were exactly the same length, but still no joy.

Could it be due to the difference in file size? They're almost the same size but I think there maybe a single byte's difference between them, I don't know if that would be enough to cause the problem?

I'm not quite sure where else to go at this point, I have a feeling there maybe something peculiar to the original mp3 encode which I'm not able to ascertain, I'm just a bit stumped really!

kakiss4: There is the possibility that there is quite more to the .dat than we can see without capcoms tools.
I also tinkered around with the files and i guess this is the work for true modders that have better tools and understanding of code than i do.
But as they have done so great work with the PSX Version, i guess it is only a matter of time.

Still fun messing around and learning :)