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6. RYMCast Genesis VGM Player

1

Inphonik has created some further games console integration. RYMCast is a handy desktop application (Windows, Linux and OS X) that plays YM2612 compatible video game music files and lets you import the sounds into RYM2612. We’ll be using it in this walkthrough and it’s free to download here: bit.ly/cm_inph_rymc. 2

To get started using RYMCast, you’ll need some .vgm or .vgz files. Thankfully these are easily available from a number of internet sites, and if a general search isn’t fruitful, you might want to start here https://project2612.org. Then head to the downloads page where you’ll find all manner of user-uploaded content. 3

Now open RYMCast. You’ll see it’s a compact application with a player interface. At the bottom you have playback controls including a position slider and a speed setting (x0.50 to x2.00). At the top are 10 cells, which will be populated once you open a suitable file. 4

Select the folder icon to open your .vgm or .vgz file. If you now hit play, RYMCast plays back the loaded game track and you’ll see it’s been split into its components. Use the mute and solo buttons to audition different aspects of the track. 5

From here, you can use the file icon to export the game audio in either stereo or multitrack formats, which is handy. However, what’s interesting to us is that each sound can be exported as a RYM2612 preset. To do this, all you have to do is drag the required sound from its cell over to the RYM2612 plugin window. 6

Here we’ve solo’d the parts to find a sound we like, and grabbed the fifth sound which is labelled YM5. Dragging this into RYM2612, you’ll see the preset bar shows RYMCast and then replaces the current preset. All that you need to do now is save the sound as a RYM2612 user preset.