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.

January 18th, 2012 - Posted in technology, video games |

Why Twitchange depresses me

Look, I don’t want to be the curmudgeon here, but I think I need to say what’s on my mind. I should first state that I agree with the general purpose of TwitChange. Raising money for a good cause? Great! Using Twitter for something other than inane bullshit? What a nice change of pace.

But come on, let’s face it: the general premise behind TwitChange is utterly depressing. Here’s the premise: you, a random Twitter user, place a bid on an eBay auction for a celebrity. If you win, you get all sorts of amazing things, like the celebrity “follow[ing] you on Twitter for a minimum of 90 days, will retweet one of your tweets and will send out a tweet including your @twitterhandle.” Whoa, man!! A celebrity will follow me for 90 days and echo my username out once!? For upwards of $500!? How is this not a bad deal for anyone involved?!?!!

I guess it just makes me sad that people feel the need to be validated by paying a bunch of cash to have a pseudo Twitter relationship with a celebrity. I love Nathan Fillion and Joel McHale and Felicia Day just as much as the next person, but I don’t go around with a handful of money asking them to be forced to interact with me. It’s a clever idea and a great way to generate money for a charity, but it’s predicated on exploiting people’s trite and awkward desires to be close to celebrities. And it’s totally artificial on top of it. Ryan Seacrest isn’t going to remember who you are the day after you win the bid.

September 23rd, 2010 - Posted in essays, technology |

iBike

So apparently Apple filed a patent for a smart bike. Not really sure why they did that, or how that fits into their business plan at all. It’ll be interesting to see what this turns out to be, though.

Of course, you’ll have to avoid using the bike in one specific way, or else risk the wheels falling off or something.

August 10th, 2010 - Posted in technology |

On technology

I walked into a meeting today while holding my Droid, and one of my coworkers said something remarkably poignant: “You have a Zune and a Droid? You really don’t like Apple, do you?” It caught me off guard a bit, but I said, “Well yeah, that’s part of it.”

And it is just part of it. (As a sidenote, I’ve been meaning to write a post like this.) I’ve thought a lot about it, and my view on technology can be summed up thusly:

When making decisions on technology, I generally prefer to go with either the underdog or the less cool option.

I’ve never owned an iPod; I had a Creative Zen before my Zune, and my next player will be a Zune HD. Admittedly I owned an iBook, but I’ve since had two Lenovo laptops. And like I said before, my phone is a Droid. Yes, the Android operating system was built by one of the largest companies out there, but they’re still pretty far behind in the smartphone world (though they’re on the way up in a big way). And maybe Lenovo and Microsoft aren’t the underdogs exactly, but it’s more of just a general distaste for Apple. All the cool kids are using Macs these days, but I’m over the hype. I prefer to have options with hardware, and I don’t need one company controlling their whole product from the top down.

But every single computer I’ve ever built for me has had an AMD processor, and as most people know, AMD is perpetually second to Intel. My new camera is a Panasonic Lumix GF1, which is built on the Micro Four Thirds standard. M4/3 is a relative newcomer to the field and it’s had some good reviews, but it’s not widely supported and it’s in big competition with other systems like it, so I consider it to be somewhat lesser right now.

In some places, though, I can’t go with the underdog. For example, I used to use Scriptaculous for all the Javascript I wrote, but recently I’ve shifted to jQuery – and I can’t go back. It’s so elegant and beautiful to write, its userbase is really active in writing plugins for it, and more companies are using it for their websites. In that case, though, I made the switch because it interferes with my career.

Oh, I actually just thought of another place: I use and actively support Firefox. A fair amount of people have jumped ship and use Chrome now, but I’m going to stick with Firefox because they’re the underdog. IE technically has a majority share, but Google’s browser is moving up, and Firefox is getting hurt by its relatively slow speed (though personally I’ve never had an issue with it.) There’s actually another component to that: I don’t like to give any one company a near-monopoly on my life. My phone, email, search engine, RSS reader, company email and phone browser are all Google, so I don’t need them having a hand on my browser. And yes, for the record, when Firefox Mobile is ready, I will use that as well.

May 18th, 2010 - Posted in technology |

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Hey there. I'm a web developer who works and lives in New York City.