missing the soundtrack ;(

Muckyfoot only had two or three tracks, not the whole thing.

I found it.

In 2010, one of my internet friend managed to convert those elusive .TFAs and .TFBs files into .WAVs files from a program he grabbed on a Sourceforge but not Sourceforge kind of website.

"I remember that program being hosted somewhere really dodgy. Like that site that was like Geocities but worse with ads everywhere."

And he did it, he converted them into .WAVs, and I converted them (read "butchered them") into .MP3s using Youtube Downloader, instead of god almighty .FLACs. I remember every single tracks came with several minutes of silence before and after every tracks, probably to add a random delay in between the tracks and to prevent the game to have non stop music. I remember having to note when every single songs started, and when they ended to cut them right. I also remember that some tracks were extremely shorts or were just birds singing, and I deleted those because "Eh... I don't need that playing in my Winamp playlist." This was partly the reason why I didn't upload the .MP3s I had.

And for years now, I've seen you guys come here and ask for the soundtrack, which I had on my hard drive, but refused to post because man, who would want effin butchered .MP3s peasants instead of .FLACs master race, so for years, every single time one of those thread popped up in here, I bugged my friend to know how he did it, every single time, and every single time, he said he'd look onto it, and then proceeded to wait a couple weeks until my feeble brain had forgotten I had asked him that question before saying "Hi!" in the Steam chat window, cleverly avoiding the question.

And tonight, after seeing this thread, I thought about putting another of my internet sleuth friend on the case, sent him one sample song, with its .TFA and .TFB file, to see if he could do something about it. After an hour, he was stumped.

"It's not encrypted (very well), and it's not compression as we know it."

So I asked my internet buddy on Steam, bugging him again to search his computer for .TFAs or .WAVs just in case he could find something, anything, that could help us. I spent the better part of the last two hours talking with those two guys and google searching "Startopia" ".TFA" "converter" ".WAV" and what not, in search for that super shady Geocities but not Geocities with worse ads. I searched my IRC logs, hoping to find the conversation we had when we converted the music files, back in March 2010. No success, my logs begun in November 2010, the rest was lost.

I went in my folder of Startopia patches, fan missions, modding guides and what not, just in case, and I found it:

tfa2wav02.zip

Dated from 03/03/2010

I ask my friend for years, I ask another friend to waste an hour or so on that, I made you wait ever since GOG added Startopia to their catalog, and it was on my own freakin hard disk all this time.

I announce this to my friend, a minute later he replies:

"I found the folder I was using. I cleverly named it something completely generic. Haha."

We're the Dumb and Dumber of the Startopia soundtrack saga. I'm sorry.

I'm working tomorrow, but I have two weeks off scheduled after that. I'll work on it, convert them into .FLACs master race and upload them somewhere. Keep your eyes peeled, you'll have your Startopia soundtrack, in its entirety, in a format that deserves to be listened to.

Still working on it?

Just in case someone is interested, I managed to find a working download link for tfa2wav02.zip:
http://web.archive.org/web/20051030115930/http://ga-agent.nm.ru/stuff/tfa2wav02.zip

EDIT: Just tested it, it works great! Thank you blueskirt42, without your post I would never have found this tool.

EDIT bis: Here goes a teaser :
startopia-menu.flac

Good to hear you managed to find that program lying around somewhere. The night I wrote the post, my friend got really motivated and ripped all the tracks into .FLACs, but then things died out when came the moment to upload it somewhere. A brief talk with GOG's Judasiscariot revealed the soundtrack was owned by SquareEnix and they were pretty adamant when it came to defending the copyrights of their games' soundtrack. Another of my friend didn't want potentially copyright infringing files hosted on his private server. As for Youtube, we figured we'd constantly get flagged and have to re-upload it under different user names. Most of my friends were suggesting our best option was to distribute it through Torrent files, and aesthetically and legally (posting Torrent links on GOG forums) speaking that seemed to me the worst possible way to distribute it. And then Real Life TM reared its ugly head and finding what to do with that soundtrack was put aside.

Yeah, nobody wants to get in a mess with rights holders…
Anyway, I think I’m going to publish a short guide so that anyone can build his own FLAC soundtrack from the TBA files provided by the game.

As for the converter itself, I’m keeping a copy of it on each and every computer I have an access to, ready to put it online again should it disappear from the Internet ;)

That seems like the best solution until the legal status of the soundtrack changes.

From what I remember, converting the files from .TFA/TFB to .WAV using the program was pretty darn easy. What was hard however was figuring out where each tracks started and where each tracks ended, because you could have like, two minutes thirty seven seconds of silence, then have the music play, and then have four minutes forty nine seconds of silence afterward in a single track because the game takes place in space and it seems Muckyfoot wanted to have minutes of silences between tracks to have a "no sound in space" mood. Or some of the biodeck tracks were just minutes of silence, then sound of alien birds chirping and then minutes of silence.

So, my suggestion for the tutorial would be to discuss a good and free program that can cut pieces of track and then save them as something better than .WAVs like .FLACs and including a list to says like "ExoticBird4.WAV starts at X:XX and ends at X:XX, etc." for all the tracks. Then people would be able to effortlessly rip the soundtrack themselves granted they have two hours to invest doing that. And as long you don't supply the .TFA/TFB files, meaning only the people that own the game on GOG, Steam or CD version can rip it, I suppose you should be safe enough. Also, once your guide is done, I suggest you post a message on the Startopia Steam forum so the good news can reach as much people as possible.

I used qwavsilence, part of the quelcom software (found in official Debian repositories), that did it for me ;)
I just had to run 'qwavsilence -S *.wav', and *poof*, all silence automagically removed!

For the record, here is a summary of the silent parts for each file: ----- With the right set of tools, it takes less than two minutes ;)

----- Sadly I can’t post anything on the Steam forums. I would need to use the client to authenticate my account (I already tried to create one), and I don’t want to install it just to be able to post on a forum.

The script to extract the StarTopia soundtrack and convert it to FLAC has just gone live:
Convert the StarTopia soundtrack to FLAC