Platforms: Windows
Year: 2001
Developed by: Mucky Foot Productions, My Little Planet
Published by: Eidos Interactive, My Little Planet, Square Enix
Number of Files: 25
Total Filesize: 116 MB (MP3), 167 MB (FLAC)
Date Added: Jul 17th, 2025
Album type: Gamerip
Uploaded by: KonoSuba_
Startopia Game Music Extraction and Preservation
The original music files from Startopia were stored in TFA format, a proprietary compressed audio container used by Mucky Foot for in-game playback. This format typically contains ADPCM-like compressed audio optimized for game memory constraints while maintaining reasonable playback quality.
Using the TFA2WAVE tool, these files were converted to WAV while preserving their native sample rate of 22 kHz.
The extracted WAV files contained sections of silence due to the nature of in-game looping and padding. Using FFmpeg in PowerShell, these silent portions were trimmed without re-encoding to retain the original audio quality.
During the MP3 conversion stage, it became clear that preserving the original 22 kHz sample rate limited the MP3 encoder to a maximum bitrate of 160 kbps, which negatively impacted playback quality due to codec limitations at low sample rates. After experimentation, a compromise was found by upsampling to 32 kHz, allowing the use of 320 kbps bitrate while applying a low-pass filter at 11 kHz to prevent artificial high-frequency artifacts and codec ringing.
With these settings, the MP3 files maintain sound quality closely approximating the original while ensuring compatibility for playback. The FLAC versions retain the exact original sound without any quality loss, preserving the Startopia soundtrack in its most authentic form.