The Sound of Her Wings - Software - Legacy of Kain: The Lost Worlds

The Sound of Her Wings

software and article by Ben Lincoln

The Sound of Her Wings is a utility for playing and converting audio clips from games developed by Crystal Dynamics. It also supports standard RIFF WAVE (*.wav) files. Its use in relation to the Legacy of Kain games is currently limited to the PC version of Soul Reaver, although it supports all of the digital audio formats used in that game.

It is not a general-purpose sound player, and cannot play mp3, Ogg Vorbis, or any other filetype not explicitly listed here.

Features:

Can convert the music, dialogue, and sound effects from Soul Reaver for the PC to standard WAV files.
Supports mass exporting of the contents of files that contain multiple clips.
Supports reading of loop point data.
Has an awesome waveform display that lets you jump around in clips by clicking on it and configurable colour scheme.

For instructions using this application in relation to Soul Reaver for the PC, please see the article Extract Soul Reaver Audio (PC) in the How To section.

Notes:

There are some very helpful troubleshooting instructions in the readme file that is included.
You must have at least version 2.0 of the .NET Framework and DirectX 9.0c installed to use this application. Both are available from the Microsoft website, and/or Windows Update. You may be able to use the application to export the audio (but not play it) without DirectX, if this is absolutely necessary.
The Sounds of Her Wings can read loop point information from file types that contain it, and the playback system contains a basic ability to play the loop n times (n can be set in the Options window). The loop information is lost when converting to WAV files, but can optionally be written into a separate text file for use in manually recreating the loops if the WAVs are imported into e.g. a sampler for musical use.
Like The Eye of RAW, The Sound of Her Wings can be associated with file types in Windows so that double- clicking them opens them in the program. The easiest way to do this is find a file (such as a PMF from Soul Reaver for the PC), right-click on it, and use the "Open with..." functionality to assign it to The Sound of Her Wings.
The music.dat and voices.dat files from Soul Reaver for the PC do not contain proper markers for the beginning or end of sections. The Sound of Her Wings makes a "best guess" based on the data in the files as to where breaks should occur. This results in one clip in music.dat and many clips in voices.dat that contain multiple clips as used in the game. They may be manually split up using a digital audio editing program like Audacity (which is free). There is also one clip in voices.dat (Raziel's "damn you, how many ages did you bind me in your grasp?") which is split up into four pieces (three on their own, and the trailing "p" attached at the beginning of the next clip). Similarly, it can be manually recombined using a digital audio editor. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for this problem, because of the aforementioned lack of markers.

Updates in version 0.2:

Recompiled to work correctly on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows®, which the previous version would not (due to its use of Managed DirectX, which is only available in a 32-bit version).
A bit of additional cleanup for the source-code release (see Source Code Collections).

For those with an interest in writing their own software, the source code for this application is available in the Source Code Collections article.

Playing a standard WAV file

Playing one of the sound effects from the raziel.pmf file

Playing a dialogue clip from voices.dat

Playing "Ozar Midrashim" from music.dat

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
The Sound of Her Wings	171 KiB	0.2	2012-02-18	Ben Lincoln
Recompiled to work correctly on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows®.

Download
File	Size	Version	Release Date	Author
The Sound of Her Wings	179 KiB	0.1	2006-12-30	Ben Lincoln