When DoW originally came out I spent forever trying to figure out how to get ahold of the music. If you search for my posts, that is probably most of what I have posted on :-P
Here is the full story on the DoW Music:
1. The pre-order of the original DoW came with a preview CD that had some "making of" movies and "the soundtrack". This wasn't very good, though, because it didn't include all the tracks. I am not sure why they billed it as the soundtrack to the game when in fact it didn't have the whole soundtrack. I was looking for 2 songs in particular that you hear all the time in the game and they weren't there :-P
2. The german site for DoW did/does have some assorted tracks. Most of these were on the CD. Strangely, there was I think one track in there that doesn't even appear in the game that I have seen - still not sure about this.
3. I looked through the mod tools, but there was nothing of any help there for converting out of the format they use in the game files to any playable format.
4. That lead me to recording the missing ones myself, which can be done by using a sound editing program to record the output directly from your sound card to hard disk. I turned down all the sound except the music and played some games, getting a block of several tracks and then editing them into individual .wav tracks. This actually works, but doesn't capture them in their 'native' format and is a bit of work. You can also do this with the mod tools, as detailed in the RDN Wiki.
5. I eventually searched every forum I could find about DoW or Homeworld, figuring someone had to have some information, as homeworld and DoW share similarities in their game files.
Eventually I came upon several threads in both relicnews and other forums that when combined allow you to extract and convert the game files into something playable (thanks to moviecodec.com forums!). At this point I had the trick, but I never got around to posting it. Then jTommy released his pack of tools, which made the process even easier, as it includes the Relic tools for converting into .WAV natively.
So here it is, a (hopefully) easy guide for getting the music out of Dawn of War!
INSTRUCTIONS:
(All steps were done in Windows XP Pro - I don't think it would be much different for any other version of Windows)
First you need to extract the music from the .SGA files. In the original DoW there are several quality levels, but in WA music has it's own seperate SGA file. Obviously you want to use the highest quality ones available (if there is a choice). These are:
<Dawn of War install directory>\W40k\W40kData-Sound-Full.sga <--- Original DoW
<Dawn of War install directory>\WXP\WXPData-Music.sga <--- Winter Assault
You use Spooky's Relic Archive Tool to get the *.fda files from these files. The thread for this tool can be found here:
http://forums.relicnews.com/showthread.php?t=21054
You can download the tool from that thread, or use this link:
Filefront [Download]
Make sure you read the readme file for this tool, as it requires that you add some .dll's to your system to make it work correctly.
The Original DoW file:
The WA file:
Simply click the "Save all files in archive" button to extract all the files:
After you extract, all the files you want will be in the directory:
<Dawn of War install directory>\W40k\Data\sound\music <---- Dow
<Dawn of War install directory>\WXP\Data\sound\music <---- WA
The files you want are the ones that end in ".fda". It may be easiest to copy them to another empty directory to play around with them. I copied them into "C:\conversion".
Once you have that, you need to convert them into .AIFx files. I originally found a conversion tool that turned them into .AIFR files, but jTommy's pack includes additional tools for converting the music even further. The official thread for that tool is here:
and you can download the pack here:
Filefront [Download]
Alternative [Download]
Unpack the conversion tool above and put it in the same directory with all the .fda files. If you want to keep the 2 sets of music seperate, you can just copy one set of files at a time. In keeping with the example, I unpacked the conversion tools to "C:\conversion" and then copied just the original DoW music files into the directory as well.
The tools are all used at the command line. Go to Start->Run and type:
and hit enter:Code:cmd
Once here, you need to navigate to the directory where all the files are and then type the command:
Seen here:Code:fda2aifc.exe *.fda
These .aifc files can be played with Winamp using a special plugin that can be found here:
http://www.winamp.com/plugins/details.php?id=272
Otherwise, you can type in one more command to convert them to .wav files, which any audio program can play. This command is:
After this is all done, you can copy out your converted files for later use, copy in another set (from WA) and restart the entire process.Code:decShell.exe *.aifc
.wav files can be played by any audio software or MP3 player, but if you want to convert to .mp3 files you can use the LAME encoder (the best free mp3 encoder out there). The homepage can be found here:
http://lame.sourceforge.net/
but to use it you will need the "binaries" or compiled code (exe), which can be found here:
http://mitiok.cjb.net/
I will let you read their help files for how to use that tool.
That's it!
Disclaimer: I had no part in creating any of the tools or plugins that are linked in this thread. I just researched how to do all this, typed these instructions, and made the screenshots. The people who made all these tools deserve much credit for their efforts!
Enjoy the DoW music! (as I am while writing this up :-D)
EDIT:
Some things that I have added in various reply posts (so you don't have to look through it all):
From post #17:
The menu music for original DoW is not in the sound-full SGA. I did some digging and found it in the Engine.sga file with the rest of the menu beeps and other things.
<DoW Install Directory>\Engine\Engine.sga
It's in the sound/music folder of that file and is called:
music_dawnofwartheme.fda
From post #13:
The unit speech files are located in this .SGA by default (for my english copy of DoW):
<DoW Install Directory>\W40k\Locale\English\W40kData-Sound-Speech.sga
After you extract that file, all the speech will be in:
<DoW Install Directory>\W40k\Locale\English\data\sound\speech\races\
I'll append any more info here when it becomes available.
Just thought others might want the same.
.
