Telltale Speech Extractor

Version 1.4.3
By Bennyboy
Quick and Easy Software

A program that enables you to rip the voices and sfx from the games developed by Telltale Games. This includes games produced by others using the Telltale engine such as Skunkape Games’ Sam & Max Save the World.

New in this version

What do I need to use this?

Just the games themselves.

How to use it

  1. Click Open and either click on open folder and choose a folder
    yourself or choose one of the games and the files will automatically
    be found.
  2. Click the Play Sound button or press enter to play the currently selected sound.
  3. Click Save File to save a sound. You can choose to save as a WAV or OGG file or let the program automatically choose the most appropriate format. OGG files will be tagged with the annotation text.
  4. Click Save All Files to save the sounds as WAV or OGG or let the program automatically choose the most appropriate format.
  5. Click the Annotations button to edit annotations. See the ‘Annotations’ section below for more information.

Filtering the sounds:

Searching the sounds:

What games are supported?

All games released so far by Telltale and Skunkape Games. Thats:

Annotations:

The sounds do not contain any textual information about their contents beyond the filename. To assist with this problem Telltale Speech Extractor supports annotations.

Annotations are descriptive names given to sounds. They list what is said and what character says it. This allows the sounds to be easily browsed, filtered and searched. They are also used when a sound is saved as an MP3. Windows imposes a limit on the length of file names, so its difficult to make a descriptive filename with the limited numbers of characters available. To counter this Telltale Speech Extractor embeds the sound’s annotation inside the MP3 as an ID3 tag. This makes it much easier to identify and find the sounds in Windows and music players.

The program comes with annotations for every Telltale game currently available, they are not all 100% complete though. In some games, there are some sounds that don’t have annotations, however the annotations can be changed and new ones added. Clicking the Annotations button brings up the annotation editing panel. In here you can edit annotations, change and add annotation categories. Remember to click the Save Changes button when you’re done, as the annotations are not automatically saved.

If you add annotations to a game, please send me your updated annotation files so that I can add them to the next release of the program. The annotation files are just standard ini files, they can be found in the ‘Annotations’ folder and have the file extension ‘.annot’.

Bugs and limitations:

Originally each episode of a game stored its resources in separate folders. However most newer games store the resources for all episodes in the same folder. The Walking Dead Season 2 and all games released since do this. If you manually choose the game folder by clicking ‘open folder’ then the program cant know which episode you want.
To fix - either choose the specific episode from the menu or choose ‘open file’ and select the individual file that you want to extract speech from…

The tool only rips audio from the speech files. If you want to rip the music files then download Telltale Music Extractor from my website.

Technical details:

The speech files used in Telltale games have changed over time, generally speaking there are 4 types of audio file used:

The way the files are stored has also changed. In earlier games (those released before Strongbad) the audio files were stored individually inside the Pack\Data\ folder. However later games packed the files inside a .ttarch bundle. To get at these files you have to get them out of the bundle first.

To make things even more complicated there’s also the issue of encryption. In ‘VOX V1’ files, packet 0 and every 64th packet are encrypted, so to get correct audio you have to decrypt these. However the encryption keys differ between games. CSI 3 Dimensions of Murder and the original releases of Sam and Max 101, Bone1, Bone2 and Texas Holdem all use the same key. However the original releases of Sam and Max 102-106 all used different keys.

In the last few years though Telltale released updated versions of Sam and Max Season 1, Bone1, Bone2 and Texas Holdem. These now use the VOX V2 format, so aren’t encrypted.

To summarise, here is the crazy array of formats and containers that this program supports:

Credits and thanks:

Support:

Contact me.

All my software is completely free. If you find this program useful please consider making a donation. This can be done on my website.

Last updated 12/12/21