You love StarTopia music? So do I ;)
But sadly it is in some obscure format (TFA/TFB) that our media players can’t play…
Well, not anymore! With the script you can download here, you can convert it to FLAC so it can be played in your favourite media player.

Here is the said script:
http://www.dotslashplay.it/scripts/startopia-ost-tfa2flac.sh

Download it, give it execution rights, and run it by giving it the path to the TFA files you want to convert.
Here is how you should run it if you installed StarTopia via the dedicated ./play.it script: In order for this script to work, the following packages need to be installed on your system: Enjoy you beautiful soundtrack, and don’t hesitate to report bugs or ask for improvements in this thread!

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Vous aimez la bande-son de StarTopia ? Moi aussi ;)
Mais malheureusement celle-ci est encodée dans un format obscur (TFA/TFB) que nos lecteurs multimédia ne savent pas décoder…
Et bien plus maintenant ! Avec le script que vous pouvez télécharger ici, vous pouvez la convertir en FLAC de façon à pouvoir la lire dans votre lecteur multimédia favori.

Le script en question se trouve ici :
http://www.dotslashplay.it/scripts/startopia-ost-tfa2flac.sh

Téléchargez-le, rendez-le exécutable, et lancez-le en lui donnant le chemin vers les fichiers TFA que vous voulez convertir.
Ce qui donne si vous avez installé StarTopia par le script ./play.it qui lui est dédié : Pour que ce script fonctionne, les paquets suivants doivent être installés sur votre système : Profitez bien de cette superbe bande-son, et bien sûr n’hésitez pas à poster ici pour rapporter un éventuel bug ou suggérer une amélioration pour ce script !

What kind of audio format and codec is TFA? I've never heard of it. Or it's some digital music like MIDI?

I have absolutely no idea ;)
Even 'file' gives up in front of these files:

Why is wine a prerequisite or is that to "extract" the files?

The actual tool that converts sources to WAV is a Windows binary which the script downloads from here: http://web.archive.org/web/20051030115930/http://ga-agent.nm.ru/stuff/tfa2wav02.zip

Parent page: https://web.archive.org/web/20060131011347/http://ga-agent.nm.ru/stuff/

A bit further Web searching discovered this: [url=http://web.aanet.com.au/~wideopen/wideopen/games/startopia/muckyfoot/wav2tfa.html]http://web.aanet.com.au/~wideopen/wideopen/games/startopia/muckyfoot/wav2tfa.html[/url]

It seems to be some weird proprietary format.

Yep, shmerl is right on this.
Anyway I guess most people having StarTopia installed on Linux already have WINE installed too ;)

If you get any more curious about how the script I wrote work, I tried to comment it extensively. And if you still have other questions after that I’m here to (try to) answer them!

Yeah, I was just being lazy as the browser wants to download the script instead of displaying it. I knew I should have looked at it first.

Thank you for all the hard work you did on that soundtrack, vv221, I'm pretty glad that stuff is now public knowledge and that soundtrack will hopefully reach its intended audience. To no longer being the only person on earth with the soundtrack because I forgot I had that tfa2wav.zip file backed up somewhere on my computer, or because I ripped it wrong the first time around six years ago, or because of some dragon sleeping on some copyrights in a dungeon somewhere is really lifting a weight off my shoulders. :)

Hey, I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I hadn’t read about tfa2wav in your posts, so you’re actually the one deserving thanks here ;)

Windows user here so I'd be OK with just wav but I can't even get the tfa2wav tool to work it seems.
I run the file and set the output to a folder on my C: drive but the .wav files I get are unplayable by WMP or FB2k so it doesn't seem like the conversion has worked properly :(

Anyone have any ideas?

I’ll give a try to tfa2wav.exe next time I have access to a Windows. In WINE it seems to work without hassle.