The sounds of King's Field IV

24 May 2020

This is a small release of relatively tedious to get sounds from From Software King's Field IV game.

Release

Download it here.

This release contains:

This does not contain streamable music (i.e. FLACs or MP3s); this is not the point of this release. If you want high quality KF4 music dumps, check out Dropoff's archive, where sound files have been synthesized using Awave Studio, which provides good results.

Having the soundfonts ready along with their samples should let composers use them directly in a DAW to compose dungeon synth, or whatever they want.

Boring details

Writing an unpacker for the main KF4 DAT archive is trivial, it has been added to libironring. Inside it, the sounds are the 3-uples of HD/BD/SQ files, which is a common tracker-style format for the PS2. Specialized software such as VGMTrans are able to convert these to common formats such as MIDI and SF2.

Unfortunately, VGMTrans has an issue where HD/BD/SQ files can't be exported even when loaded together. A workaround is to pack them as PSF2 archives, e.g. using mkpsf2, so converting works properly.