PSF Frequently Asked Questions

Highly Experimental v2.08 supports the Winamp Advanced Title Formatting feature, which lets Winamp decide what the title format will be, rather than each individual plugin. To alter this behavior, go to Winamp's Preferences dialog, under "Titles", and see the section named "Advanced Title Formatting".

The PSF1 format works with sequenced music only, not streamed.

• Did you know there are existing tools like PSMPlay which can rip XA streamed songs?
• VB2rip works with various other Playstation streamed formats.

I'll give you an example:

• MIDI, MOD, S3M, XM, and IT are examples of sequenced formats.
• WAV, MP3, OGG, MPC, WMA, and RM are examples of streamed formats.

It is possible to create PSF2 files that hold streamed music, but only under certain circumstances, and often this is impractical due to the size of ADPCM versus more advanced lossy formats such as MP3 or MPC.

You'll probably never find PSF files by looking directly on game CDs. They have to be created by hand using the original game's data.

Ripping PSFs involves knowledge of R3000 assembly. It's not for everyone.

Please don't send me emails of this sort.

If the game is listed as finished/released, it should show up on the mirrors soon.

Well, today's your lucky day! See FF7 Music with FF7 PSFs from the Final Fantasy Soundfont Project.

Saturn and Dreamcast sound formats are now under development. Besides those, I have no plans to make other music formats or players at this time.

No, but it's pretty close:

• Per-channel resampling is done with 4-point interpolation, using the same response curve as a real PSX. It also happens to be the same response curve used by the SNES, which I discovered a few years ago and called "Gaussian" because it looked a little bit like a Gaussian curve. This is the same curve used by ZSNES in "Gaussian interpolation" mode. In reality, I have no idea if it's a Gaussian function at all, but I have the table numbers and that's all that matters. (It should be a well-known fact that Sony also made the sound chip used in the SNES.)
• Envelope timing has one-sample resolution. Timing and amplitude measurements were taken from a real PSX and used to form a model of how the real enveloping hardware works, which turned out to be rather simple. I donated this information to Pete's SPU plugin project.
• I discovered how the reverb hardware works, and what all the registers do, during 3 days of intense experimentation with a test program I wrote that graphed the reverb buffer output onto the screen in realtime. I donated this information to Pete's SPU plugin project, and the Eternal SPU plugin now has a "Neill's" reverb mode as well.

That having been said, there are a few things Highly Experimental does not do:

• The exact output coefficients used for playing the contents of the reverb buffer haven't been found yet, but they're approximated fairly well.
• The exact algorithm for downsampling channel data going into the reverb buffer was never found, but it's also been approximated well enough (using an 8-point filter).
• Pitch modulation modes aren't supported, but practically no music uses this. Mostly it's just sound effects.
• SPU IRQs aren't supported, but they're only used for streaming music, which PSF1 doesn't support anyway, and there are other equally-valid ways to do it on PSF2.

Technically yes, but the space savings would rarely be significant, or the soundtrack would have probably been ripped as MiniPSF in the first place.

It depends on the game. Some games lend themselves well to the MiniPSF format, such as games where all songs share a common sound bank (Final Fantasy 7, Final Fantasy Tactics).

That's because it's a command-line program. Please don't ask me how to use the command line.

• MiniPSF support was added in Highly Experimental v1.04
• PSF2 and MiniPSF2 support was added in Highly Experimental v2.0

If you downloaded a .RAR file somewhere, it's an archive that you have to extract other files from first. See also: What is a RAR file?

You can use Winamp 2's DiskWriter feature to do this. Go to the Preferences dialog, select "Output" under "Plug-ins", and select "Nullsoft Disk Writer".

Several possibilities:

• Try upgrading to the latest version of your player, such as Highly Experimental.
• You may be using an outdated or improper PSF set. Try finding a better copy.
• You may be running into a NTSC vs. PAL issue. Try adding _refresh=50 or _refresh=60 in the raw tag editor.

Not yet. This feature is under consideration.

I understand that there's a demand for these sorts of programs, but that's not my focus at this time.

Set it to 0 to disable the random pics.