Since I am no longer allowed to host the soundtrack from "Knights of the Old Republic" on this site, I have decided to put up a tutorial, which allows you to rip the music from the game by yourself (given that you own the game, and have it installed on your hard drive). For this game, LucasArts and Bioware decided to let composer Jeremy Soule, who has already composed the soundtracks for several games (like "Icewind Dale", "Dungeon Siege" or "Morrowind"), create a new sound for the "Star Wars" universe, unlike most previous SW-games, which utilized John Williams' original compositions for the movies. So, let's get started...

In order to follow this tutorial, you'll need some tools installed:

• The Miles Sound Tools
• The RAD Video Tools
• WinLAME (for MP3-encoding... of course you can use any other encoder as well)
• And, of course, you need the game itself installed on your HD

Create a new folder on your HD, and name it whatever you like (it will act as our work folder). Go into the StreamMusic sub-folder of your game-directory and copy the following files into the work folder:

Now we need to convert the files from their Miles-compression into uncompressed WAV-files.

To do this start up the Miles Sound Studio from your Miles Sound Tools-group in the start menu. Navigate to the work folder, select the first file and click on Decompress. Unfortunately you can't select all of the files at once and decompress all of them with one click, therefore you'll have to do this for each file (just press ENTER when the file-name dialog pops up... the tool will add a New_ in front of each file name automatically).

When all files are decompressed, you can delete the old files (the ones without New_ in front of them).

Now we'll rename the files to match my covers (keep the .wav extension):

You'll notice that the file New_evil_ending.wav wasn't used, since I've used the "light side" ending for the end credits track. If you're capable of some sound editing, you might want to take the first 40 seconds from that file (the part before the Star Wars end theme), and edit it in front of New_mus_theme_sith.wav to get all of the Sith music into that track. If not, just forget about that file.

You might have noticed that, according to the numbering, some tracks are still missing, so now we'll deal with those.

For an easy start, you can get the first track HERE (which is already MP3ified).

The second track is supposed to be the Star Wars main theme. Of course you can use your favourite version of the theme here, but since it's the KotOR-soundtrack, you might want to use the version played in the game's opening movie. So now we'll have to extract the audio from some of the game's cutscenes.

Start up the RAD Video Tools found in the Bink and Smacker-group in your start menu, and navigate to your Movies folder (inside your game directory). Select the file 01a.bik and click on the Convert a file button. When asked if you want to treat the numbered files as a single animation choose No.

A window pops up in which you make sure that Convert video is unchecked, wheras Convert audio must be checked, and all numeric fields in the audio-area left blank. Browse... the output file to be created inside your work folder, and name the file 02 - Main Theme.wav. Hit the Convert button, and after a few seconds the file got decompressed into a WAV-file. (You might want to use a sound-editing tool to trim the "A long time ago..."-silence from the beginning of the track, and the sound effects of the space battle from the end of it, but I'll leave that up to you)

Repeat this procedure for 03.bik, which should be named 13 - The Leviathan.wav, and for 05_2a.bik, which we'll name 17 - Arrival at Dantooine.wav.

That's it, we're finished. You might want to convert all .wav files into the MP3-format (using Lame or whatever encoder you like), or some other audio format, to save disk space.

Then burn them to a CD, and print out the covers below.

Enjoy!