the best way to rip music from WAD files?

[diosoth]

Sometimes I'll play through a user-made WAD file and hear some music I like well enough to want to keep copies of for personal listening. But I've had terrible luck in ripping such files. XWE is barely adequate for this task. Some user maps use different music formats. How would I best go about extracting these files from WADs into a standard format that I can load through Winamp?

I've also wondered... are there any such online selections of the more common Doom level music pieces? Some tunes I hear rather often and have wondered if there are archives similar to the Realm 667 monster beastiary, aimed at music.

[kittytaymar]

Well, I tend to use XWE to extract the .mus file then MUS2MIDI to convert it. That's the easiest way, I think.

AFAIK, the only useful sound formats allowed in a wad are MUS and WAV, maybe others for different ports.

I think doomworld has a music archive, somewhere.

[GreyGhost]

XWE only recognizes a few music formats. For anything other than midi/mus your best bet is to save the music as a .lmp file, use a utility like TrIDNet to identify the format then rename the file.

Doomworld's music pages are here and there's a music section in the archive.

[myk]

Usually, the music uses the standard music lump names. With XWE you can extract it as a lump, regardless of the content. You can then use a text or hex editor (or what GreyGhost suggested) to see what format the lump is in (MUS, MIDI, MOD, MP3 or whatever.) If it's a MUS or MIDI, XWE will tell you, though. Once the file is extracted, just rename the extension and the music should be usable in its corresponding player. For MUS files, you may need to apply Mus2Midi if XWE didn't do it for you.

Some have new names for the music. In these cases you need to check the lump that renames the songs to find out which lumps are music (DeHackEd, BEX, MAPINFO, and what not) and what level they belong to.