M1: the pro way to rip arcade music

http://rbelmont.mameworld.info/?page_id=223

It's a command line arcade emulator—it's MAME, with everything but the audio parts stripped out. You point its config file to your ROMs, invoke it with the name of the rom, and select the music or sound effect track to play. Add the -w switch and it'll dump to WAV.

Example:

> m1 -w tekken3

It supports a lot of games you won't find in MAME ports like FBA, like the games on Playstation-based hardware.

Perfect. Or is it?

It hasn't been updated since 2008ish, so the core can't be any more recent than about 0.123. Some rom names and contents have been changed since then, and some new games have been emulated. It doesn't support all the stuff that was in MAME at the time, like CPS3.

You can't specify a track to start at. So if you are in dump mode you'll get some small unwanted files while you key through the tracks. It would be cool if there was an unattended dump mode: record the specified track for the specified number of seconds at maximum speed, with no output to speakers.

There are a lot of blank and duplicate tracks, and they are all unlabeled. That's just the way the roms are. You can make .lst playlists with track names. There's an example list, but no documentation on the format.

Incidentally, FBA also supports .lst and .dat format playlist files for its clumsy jukebox feature.

Comments

[b]

Check here for lists and the frontend:
http://www.e2j.net/downloads.html

[dammit]

Cool.