Saturday, January 09, 2010

Making mp3 versions of C64 tunes

The music from old Commodore 64 games is available to download in "sid" format from http://hvsc.c64.org/.

I had previously downloaded the collection and found some of my old favourites. I had been playing them every few months using the Windows version of sidplay.

But since I've moved to using ubuntu as my main operating system I was missing them as now I only boot Windows to do iTunes stuff. Installing a player was as simple as typing
sudo apt-get install sidplay.

To create a .wav version of a .sid tune you use:
sidplay2 -os -o1 -w -t5:14 sanxion.sid.
The flags are all documented in the man page.

You could use lame to convert the .wav to .mp3 but I used the Sound Converter application.

Then I added the folder containing the mp3s to iTunes, edited the ID3 tags, added them to my iPhone playlist, synced, and now I can listen to C64 music wherever I am.

The games I did this for include:
  • The Ocean Loader: #1 and #4
  • Sanxion
  • Last Ninja 2
  • Monty On The Run
  • Crazy Comets
  • Cybernoid 1 and 2
  • Myth
  • Flash Gordon
  • Parallax
  • Thrust
  • Wizball

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