!ATTENTION! CAVS "NCG" files *CAN* BE CONVERTED!!

[trippster]

Awesome news everyone, I've found a gentleman here in Texas that claimed he is the only one that can convert our CAVS ".ncg" files (Note: that is not ".mcg", that's N as in Nancy, not M as in Michael). And it is true!

Originally he wanted me to send him a hard drive with all the .ncg song files on it so that he could convert them back on to the original hard drive (something about copyright laws), but I talked him into letting me send him my backup files on DVD. It took about a week, but let me tell you.... It worked and works great with kJams!! His charge is 2¢ a song, yes you heard me right, $0.02 per song! His name is Frank and he's a great guy! Here is his website link and contact info:

http://www.kjamp.com/RBKP05.php

RoxBox
325 Sheri Lane
Hurst, TX 76053
USA

1-817-230-4921

frank@kjamp.com

Trust me everyone, he's the genuine article, please don't forget to tell him Christopher from Austin sent you !!!

[El Ramos]

Awesome news everyone, I've found a gentleman here in Texas that claimed he is the only one that can convert our CAVS ".ncg" files (Note: that is not ".mcg", that's N as in Nancy, not M as in Michael).

All my CAVS files have extension .MCG, not .NCG. How do the two file types differ?

[dave]

Check the FAQ.

[El Ramos]

Check the FAQ.

I asked here because the ".mcg/.ncg" FAQ entry doesn't answer my question.

Again: How do these two file types differ from each other?

[dave]

If the differences were publicly available then I would be able to support the formats. They are proprietary formats hence their contents is hidden and not documented. As far as I know they both suck.

[El Ramos]

If the differences were publicly available then I would be able to support the formats. They are proprietary formats hence their contents is hidden and not documented.

So, the differences are as yet unknown? I see...or, don't see, as the case may be.

I'm in the midst of converting 42,000 or so .MCGs to .CDGs using CAVS' extortion, er, conversion tool. I notice that each resulting CDG is 5-10 times larger than the MCG it came from, which seems to prove that MCGs are compressed in some way.

I wonder if the CAVS developers simply used some off-the-shelf ZIP library to store the data, then called it a day? If so, retracing their steps could be as easy as taking the path of least resistance!

[dave]

Okay i've done a bit of reverse engineering work on MCG, it really is just a compressed version of CDG, where they simply "remove" all the records that say "nothing is happening now" and where they also compress out any redundancy. I don't have it yet and I won't be able to work on it for a while, but at least now i know that much. It is not a zip compression.

[dave]

I've got code. Very soon you'll be able to play NCG and MCG files within kJams. Yay!

-dave

[dave]

kJams now fully supports NCG and MCG files, without needing conversion. Just load them up like they are regular CDG's and you're good to go, it "just works"!

-dave