Overview
A guide that explains how to extract Road Redemption’s music from the game’s resources
Update
I created this guide back in 2014 when Road Redemption was still in early access. The instructions in my guide might be incompatible with the current version.
Introduction
After playing RR for a while I really came to like the soundtrack. Of course I tried to find it readily available in the game’s directory, easy to move over to my music library. That was not the case.
When researching the matter further, I also found that no-one on Steam or elsewhere seems to have explained where exactly the music is and how to get at it.
I also could not find the soundtrack by itself anywhere on its own at the moment, except as part of the game’s $70 Special Edition.
Enough motivation to get the soundtrack!
Prerequisites
Before we can continue, we should make sure that we bought Road Redemption, activated it to our Steam account and installed it.
Now we visit the following thread on the ZenHAX forum, a “Free Game Research and Security Community” where we can find the Unity Assets Explorer (“UAE”) made by Haoose et al.
[link]
We download the program from Dropbox or the attachment and extract it using 7-zip[www.7-zip.org] (open source software) or WinRAR[rarlabs.com] (shareware). You should now have these files, if you downloaded the attachment in the thread:
Before proceeding further, we upload the .exe file on [link] to see if it is recognized by any antivirus scanners as malicious just in case.
Extracting the music
We open the UAE which looks like this.
We click on the button at the top saying “Open Assets-file.” In the opened window we navigate to where Road Redemption is installed, usually under C:Program Files (x86)SteamsteamappscommonRoadRedemption. We open the subdirectory RoadRedemptionEarlyAccess_Datawhere we see these files.
First we open resources.assets which then looks like this.
We enter “.ogg” into the search field below the list which takes us to where the music is among the many files. The first item is #1461, resources/DroptheHammer1.ogg. With a little scrolling and using [Shift] + Click, we can highlight all files with the ogg file extension which are right below DroptheHammer1. After highlighting them all, we right-click somewhere on the highlighted files and choose “Extract This Files” (yes, bad English) from the context menu.
You can see the extraction progress in the bottom window. After everything is done, you will see this message.
Almost done. Only two more tracks to do. Open the other .assets files just like the previous one and use the search to find and extract these files:
- sharedassets0.assets: pretty killer_fadeIn.ogg
- sharedassets6.assets: rainbowRoad.ogg
If we see the following error message
UAE saves the files in the directory where you downloaded/extracted it to. Move all the files into a single directory, for example “Road Redemption OST” to make things more organized. If you did everything as described here, you should now have these 30 files:
A couple more tracks were added to the game on October 30th 2014. Also extract these files from resources.assets:
AlScare.ogg
Devils_Chorus.ogg
FearTwentyPercent.ogg
ghostTechnoDream.ogg
labry.ogg
Scary.ogg
Technical aspects and limitations
The music you just extracted from the game’s assets is encoded with the OGG Vorbis codec[en.wikipedia.org] codec at about 120kbit/s.
Your phone might not support this format. I recommend foobar2000 to convert the files to mp3. (Recommended format: lame, MP3 VBR, V5) There are probably other guides for this.
While the quality of these files is alright, it is far from perfect. I used Audacity to look at a spectrogram of one of the tracks and the low quality is apparent. The cutoff at about 16 kHz means the quality is similar to a 128 kbit MP3 which is about the quality of a webradio stream, but not of a high fidelity audio recording. This screenshot compares an HD remix of Road Redemption’s menu music posted on Youtube by “HD Mixes” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOS-Ek6CkQ (top) with the track we just extracted (bottom).
The files extracted here include neither the name of the artist(s) nor track numbers, production year, etc. There are only the somewhat descriptive filenames.
Presumably, both the issue of the audio quality as well as missing tags are not an issue in the soundtrack that is offered as part of Road Redemption’s Special Edition.
Unfortunately Road Redemption’s shop page or the Humble Store have no further details about the soundtrack.
I believe that this extraction process as well as explaining it fall under fair use.
This guide should only be available on Steam: [link]