NSF Importer By Rainwarrior

Kasumi

New member
I weighed the pros and cons of making this topic over the last week. Decided to roll with it.
This is NSF Importer by rainwarrior: http://rainwarrior.ca/projects/nes/nsfimport.html
It's a modification of FamiTracker that lets you import tracks from NSF Files into Famitracker.
An NSF file is basically a ROM file with only audio playback code in it.

So why would you want to import one? To get an idea of how to achieve specific sounds you've heard on NES within FamiTracker. It doesn't import in a NESMaker/GGSound/Edit Friendly format, but the idea isn't to take music verbatim. Just to study it. It helped a lot for making my Indivisible music and sound effects.

Here's an NSF for Shovel Knight to try it with: https://web.archive.org/web/20140701001548/http://biglionmusic.com/Shovel_Knight_Music.nsf
(This is an archive of a download still linked from the composer's official band camp: https://virt.bandcamp.com/album/shovel-knight-original-soundtrack so it should be cool to share.)

Go to File, Import NSF in NSF Importer. Input the track number you want to see, and click okay. Note that editing is intentionally disabled in NSF Importer's FamiTracker, but you can still play the song with enter.
How do you find out which track is which so you can import only the songs you're interested in? Grab NSFPlay to play the NSF file: http://rainwarrior.ca/projects/nsfplay/index.html

How would you use this to study? You can see how the song is changing the volume column, and what effects it's using for every single note. So if you like the drums in a certain song, but aren't sure how to make them this can reveal that for you. Just keep in mind you can't use the volume column or effects columns. You have to recreate the values within an instrument. Also be aware that some NSFs (Shovel Knight included) use music extensions that aren't available to NES Maker. (It was more difficult to find one as nice that was totally cool to distribute.) Still Shovel Knight's soundtrack still sounds pretty fine even if you mute the "extra" channels.
 
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