The PC-98 Instrument Sample Collection

After uploading my PC-98 cover of Dark Tranquillity's song "Iridium," some requests were made to share the instrument samples I used to make it. And since I wanted to make them freely available to everyone anyway, I now present to you all a collection of PC-98 instrument sound samples, for use in music-making or any other shenanigans.

The samples are all in .wav format and cover most of the instrument sounds ZUN used in his FM synth compositions. The only soundtrack that isn't represented here is the original version of Highly Responsive to Prayers (the audio rips I had access to only had the Akyuu's Untouched Score remake, although I may see about recording the originals in the future and add anything unique to them in here). While it's not exactly the elusive PC-98 Touhou soundfont some music composers out there have been looking for, it does hopefully provide the materials to make it (or, if you're an unorthodox composer like me, you can use import the wav files directly into an audio or video editing program and make the music that way if you're so inclined). When possible I tried to get samples of the same instrument at multiple pitches. Even though not all pitch samples are the same length (some draw out for multiple seconds, while others are just the very brief snippets that the recorded song used), hopefully the variety will aid in soundfont efforts, as well as if a given sound shows too much distortion when pitch shifted too far. (As far as I can tell, getting consistent, drawn out sample sounds at many pitches would require being able to program up a music file with them that FMPMD can play, which is beyond my own programming skill as of now; it's on the to-maybe-do list with HRtP's music, though).

In case you're interested in how these were put together, it started with the acquisition of PC-98 audio rips posted on Maidens of the Kaleidoscope (many thanks to Drake over there for providing such resources). The rips were all directly in .M format, the format a PC-98 computer or emulator reads to know what to play. By opening these files in FMPMD (a music player also included with the rips), I was able to isolate individual audio channels while the songs played. This made it possible to have one instrument playing at a time. Using this in combination with Sony Vegas (though an audio program like Audacity also works), and a laptop capable of recording "what you hear," I went through multiple songs from Touhous 2-5 and recorded them one channel at a time (a total of 6 FM channels, 2 SSG channels, and a third SSG channel all percussion is played through). After that I searched through the recordings for good moments when an instrument was played and snipped them out to be used as samples. In all I ended up recording some or all channels of 17 of ZUN's composition, plus a very well-made cover of "Kobito of the Shining Needle ~ Little Princess" done by HertzDevil (just gonna give that a much-deserved link --- if you like 8-bit covers of Touhou music, I recommend checking out his other work too if you haven't already).

If there's anything in particular you would like to see included in the collection (an instrument I missed, a better sample of anything, whatever it may be), let me know and I will do my best to find it and add it in. There's a lot of songs I didn't go through yet, and odds are what you're looking for may yet be in one of those. When an update is made I will update the title of this post to reflect it.

Edit: Just noticed that in my numbering of the files I jumped straight from f27 to f29 without noticing. Don't worry, an instument's not missing there, it's just a typo. Will fix that in the next update.