The Portable Sound Format (PSF) is a music

file format A file format is a Computer standard, standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary format, pr ...

ripped directly from video games from a variety of video game consoles. The format was originally used for

PlayStation is a video gaming brand owned and produced by Sony Interactive Entertainment (SIE), a division of Japanese conglomerate Sony. Its flagship products consists of a series of home video game consoles produced under the brand; it also consists ...

video games, but has since been adapted to support other systems. The PSF format was publicly documented by Neill Corlett in 2003, who also wrote a

Winamp Winamp is a media player (software), media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Rad ...

plug-in named "Highly Experimental" that plays PSF1 and PSF2 files. Generally, PSF files contain a number of samples and a

music sequencer A music sequencer (or audio sequencer or simply sequencer) is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling Musical note, note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open ...

player program. This takes far less space than an equivalent streamed format of the same music (

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

) while still sounding high fidelity. Background music stored in PSF files can usually be looped forever, as the sequencer handles its own loop points. Several PSF sub-formats also have a ''miniPSF/PSFlib'' capability, wherein data used by multiple tracks is stored only once in an accompanying ''PSFlib'' file. Further differences are stored in a ''miniPSF'' file, which can be compressed via

zlib zlib ( or "zeta-lib", ) is a software library used for data compression as well as a data format. zlib was written by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and is an abstraction of the DEFLATE compression algorithm used in their gzip file compre ...

to further increase storage efficiency. A PSF2 file is the

PlayStation 2 The PlayStation 2 (PS2) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, Sony Computer Entertainment. It was first released in Japan on 4 March 2000, in North America on 26 October, in Europe on 24 Novembe ...

equivalent of a PSF. PSF2 is internally structured as a file system, rather than PSF, which is a single PS executable. PSF's native sample rate is

44,100 Hz In digital audio, 44,100 Hz (alternately represented as 44.1 kHz) is a common sampling frequency. Analog audio is often recorded by sampling it 44,100 times per second, and then these samples are used to reconstruct the audio signal whe ...

, while PSF2's is

48,000 Hz In digital audio, 48,000 Hz (also represented as 48 kHz or DVD Quality) is a common sampling rate. It has become the standard for professional audio and video. 48 kHz is evenly divisible by 24, a common frame rate for media, such ...

. Rates may vary from 8,000 Hz to 96,000 Hz. Both PSF and PSF2 files contain a header which specifies the type of video game system the file contains data for, and an optional set of tags at the end which can give detailed information such as game name, artist and length.

PSF sub-formats

PSF initially stood only for "''PlayStation Sound Format''", but with the addition of the PSF2, SSF (Sega Saturn Sound Format), DSF (Dreamcast Sound Format), USF (Nintendo Ultra 64 Sound Format), QSF (Capcom Q-Sound Format), GSF (Game Boy Advance Sound Format), and 2SF (Nintendo DS Sound Format) sub-formats, the more generic

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

"Portable Sound Format" was developed. As a result, PSF and PSF1 interchangeably refer to PlayStation sound data files.

GSF

GBA Sound Format (GSF) is an emulated

Game Boy Advance The (GBA) is a 32-bit handheld game console, manufactured by Nintendo, which was released in Japan on March 21, 2001, and to international markets that June. It was later released in mainland China in 2004, under the name iQue Game Boy Advanc ...

audio format developed by Caitsith2 and Zoopd. The basic GSF file structure is a sub-format of PSF. GSF players emulate the files as sound-only Game Boy Advance ROMs, and as such can be processor intensive when compared to mainstream audio formats.

USF

Nintendo Ultra64 Sound Format (USF) is a file format by Adam Gashlin that contains the sound-generating code from a

Nintendo 64 The (N64) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released in Japan on June 23, 1996, in North America on September 29, 1996, and in Europe and Australia on March 1, 1997. As the successor to the Super Nintendo E ...

video game. The basic USF file structure is a sub-format of PSF.

References

* {{reflist

External links

Neill Corlett's PSF Central

Lawrence Lin's PSF Mirror

Zophar's Domain PSF Archive

Players and plug-ins

Mac/Windows/Linux chiptune player that supports 33 different music formats including PSF1 and PSF2. *

Audacious Media Player Audacious is a Free and open-source software, free and open-source audio player software with a focus on low resource use, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible ...

Linux player that supports playback of PSF1 and PSF2 via plug-in.
Chipamp
- Winamp plug-in bundle compiled by

OverClocked ReMix OverClocked ReMix, also known as OC ReMix and OCR, is a non-commercial organization dedicated to preserving and paying tribute to video game music through arranging and re-interpreting the songs, both with new technology and software and by vari ...

allowing playback of over 40 chiptune and tracker formats
UPSE123
- UNIX Playstation Sound Emulator, playstation sound emulator which concentrates on sound correctness. It plays PSF and MiniPSF format files. Video game music file formats Audio file formats PlayStation (console)