NES/SNES ringtones

Why have my phone blast out the latest Fiddy Cent or Gwen Stefani in craptastic QCP when I can geek it up with authentic NES or SNES chiptunes that sound better at low bitrates?

[b]For NES:[/b]

1. First I head to [URL=http://www.zophar.net/nsf/]Zophar's NSF Archive[/URL] and download the game I want the music from. If the files are seperated by track, great. If not,

2. Use any [URL=http://www.zophar.net/utilities/nsf.html]NSF player[/URL] to determine which song you want (if it's an archive) and how many seconds you want of it. If you only want a single track, you can seperate the tracks using [URL=http://www.zophar.net/utilities/download/NSFTrackRipper.rar]NSF Track Ripper[/URL].

3. Use the NSF2WAV command-line utility with nez_plug.dll (both available from the [URL=http://nezplug.sourceforge.net/]NEZPlug website[/URL]) to convert them to 16kHz WAVs. (You can up the sound quality all you want, but it'll only increase the filesize without much gain). The usage is:

nsf2wav -f[frequency] -t[time] -n[song] -o[outputfile.wav] song.nsf

As stated, the best setting for -f is 16000 (16kHz).

[b]For SNES:[/b]

1. Get to [URL=http://www.zophar.net/spc/]Zophar's SPC Archive[/URL] and download the SPCs from the game you want. Typically they're already seperated into tracks.

2. Use any number of [URL=http://www.zophar.net/utilities/spc.html]SPC players[/URL] to convert into .wav. I prefer [URL=http://www.foobar2000.org/foobar2000.exe]Foobar2000[/URL] with out-of-the-box SPC support and .wav conversion. It's also a damn good music player period.

[b]For both:[/b]

1. Use Sound Recorder (start/run/sndrec32) to trim the file as desired and resave as .wav.

2. Download the [URL=http://mitiok.cjb.net/]LAME command-line MP3 encoder[/URL] and use it to create an MP3. Recommended usage is:

lame -b 32 -h -m m inputfile.nsf/spc output.mp3

Which will create a 32kbps high-quality mono MP3. For SNES, use a -b setting of 64 (which will create a larger filesize, but it's worth it).

3. Use any of the MP3 uploader sites to get it to your phone.

[b]NOTES:[/b]

- This is only for phones that natively support MP3. I personally use my Treo 650 and Ringo to let me play MP3 ringtones. I don't know what they'll sound like if an uploader site converts them to .qcp.

- Filesizes are about 30-40K for 32kbps MP3s and 60-70K for 64kbps MP3s.

- I also lean towards command-line solutions because that makes it easier to automate things by dragging-dropping over a .bat file.

Hopefully other geeks like me can now party like it's 1989. :D

[Crossposted to sprintusers.com forums]