Torment Music Conversion by Jason (Formatted by Ganesh from Bootstrike.Com)
To extract, and then convert, the music to WAV from Planescape: Torment ( or any Infinity engine game) you will need two programs. The first is NearInfinity. You can get it at: http://www.idi.ntnu.no/~joh/ni/.
Don't let this program intimidate you. It has a lot of advanced tools, but for getting the music you won't need them. You may also need to update/install Java on your machine. I suggest following the link at the above site and letting it install it on your machine, so you know it's on correctly.
The second program is an Acm2wav converter. There is a link from Bootstrike Planescape: Torment Music section, or you can run a search (Excite worked for me) and you will find several. This will allow NearInfinity to convert the music from .acm files to .wav files you can play with your media player. You can download the files to any place you want. To keep everything in the same place, I made a new folder on my desktop and put everything there. Install NearInfinity, unzip acm2wav and you are almost ready to start.
To make it easier, I copied the NearInfin.jar file right into my main Torment folder (C:\Program Files\Black Isle\Torment). You also need to make sure acm2wav is located in the same folder as that jar file, so I unzipped the whole thing to my Torment folder as well.
Click Start NearInfinity. If it's in your Game file, you shouldn't need to set a path to the game. You will see a list of available files on the left of the screen. Open the one that says music. For now, ignore the first five (BT-1 thru BT-5). These are battle music, and need to be strung together. The first song should be Baat-1. Open it, click BAATOR.ACM. The options Convert Mono/Stereo should appear to the right. Choose one. If everything is on your machine correctly, the play button should light up. Click it, and the song should play!
Saving it to WAV format
Now you are ready to export it so you can listen to it whenever you want. This part of the process gave me the most trouble, so this is step by step how I got it to work.
- Right click the song. ex. BAATOR.ACM
- Click "export".
- Put it in your Torment folder. If get a warning that the file already exists, when it asks you if you want to overwrite the file click NO. The file will still put in the folder, but it won't replace the original.
- Go to your torment folder, find the new songs icon and click it. If all went well, your song should play.
Congratulations! Now you can put it anywhere you want. I made a Music folder on my desktop and Cut/Paste all the songs there.
I still don't have the songs...
There are a few problems I ran into while doing all this. The first was that the acm2wav program I had gave me terrible quality sound. If this happens to you, delete the acm2wav files from your Torment folder, return to the web and find a different one. The one from Bootstrike is excellent for stringing them together. Unfortunately, I got poor sound quality on the torment songs. (It worked fine for IWD 2)
Remember, you don't need to run the acm2wav program. Just make sure it is in the same folder as the NearInfinity.JAR. NearInfinity should find and use the converter on it's own.
If you didn't place the .jar file in you game folder, you may need to select the path to the game. It will be looking for the CHITIN.key file. In NearInfinity, click - Game > Open game, then find your game file. Ex. open C:\Program Files\Black Isle\Planescape: Torment. There you should find the Chitin.key file. Select it and click open. Now NearInfinity should recognize the files. Also, you should only need to do this once.
As a final note, read through the info. at the NearInfinity site. It has a lot of good suggestions on how to get NearInfinity to run properly.
If you have any more questions, post on the Bootstrike.com Forums. I check them often. I, or someone else, will certainly be able to help you there.
As a legal note: The songs in these games are copyrighted. They are the property of Black Isle and/or Interplay. Use them for your own entertainment only. Redistribution and such is prohibited.