How to extract and convert Skyrim audio

In a moment of self-indulgent nerdiness, I spent a fair amount of time scouring the Internet and figuring out how to extract the dragon shouts from Skyrim. These directions could also be used to extract anything. Hopefully this post helps someone who was as lost as I was.

1. Download BSA Unpacker, Voice file extractor, and xWMAEncode.
2. Use BSA Unpacker and point it at Skyrim – Voices.bsa. It’s in the Skryim\data folder.
3. Look through and find all the files you want to extract. For the shouts, for example, I extracted everything that started with maleeventoned/voicepowers_.
4. Extract everything to its own folder.
5. To convert one .fuz file to a .wav, do:

   fuz_extractor.exe -e file.fuz
   xWMAEncode.exe file.xwm file.wav

Basically how this works is that fuz_extractor pulls out the .lip and .xwm from the .fuz, and then xWMAEncode converts the .xwm to a .wav file.

Now obviously this is tedious for some eighty-odd files, so I used PowerShell, a really useful scripting tool that comes with Windows. Here’s the script I ran:

cd c:\shouts
foreach($f in $(gci C:\shouts | % {$_.BaseName})) {
    .\fuz_extractor.exe -e $f.fuz
    .\xWMAEncode.exe $f.xwm $f".wav"
}

And then just let it run. You’ll have to tweak it to fit your own setup, but that’s how I did it. Once you’ve got your .wav files, you can do whatever you want with them. You could run them right through an MP3 encoder and get MP3s, or you could edit them in Audacity.