About
A solo project to archive in-game radio. Built because the audio in modern game ports keeps getting worse, and the original recordings deserve better than ending up in a 22 kHz mono mix.
Why this exists
I'm Blake. I'm 17. I run this on my own.
It started because I went back to Saints Row 2 and the radio sounded rough. The PC port ships every station at 22050 Hz mono, dropping almost everything that gave the in-car audio its character on the Xbox 360. After a few weekends extracting wave banks I had a folder of named WAV files and figured someone else might want them too.
What's archived
Each station gets a full track list and a write-up covering the host, playlist structure and anything notable about how it played in-game. Audio uploads are still in progress: some stations have all their songs, others are partial, and the jingles, station IDs and DJ talk segments are extracted but not yet hosted.
Where possible the entries cross-reference the same station across sequels. KRhyme runs across Saints Row 2 and Saints Row: The Third with completely different playlists, so each version has its own page and they link to each other.
How it works
Game files get unpacked with format-specific tools. For Saints Row 2
that's XACT wave banks decoded through
vgmstream. For Saints Row: The
Third it's Volition's Wwise-derived .bnk_pc archives,
unpacked with ToadKing's extractor
and decoded the same way.
For licensed songs I run each clip through Chromaprint to get a
fingerprint, then look it up against
AcoustID. That returns artist and
title for anything commercially released. For the rest, the canonical
track names sit inside the game's own data tables: Volition's
music.xtbl file lists every cue with its filename, so a
Python script matches XWB subsongs to the table by duration and you
end up with the official names Volition gave each clip.
Jingles, station IDs, DJ talk segments and fake adverts get labelled by hand. Most of those names come straight from the xtbl files too; the rest get cross-checked against the Saints Row wiki where the community has already worked them out.
Takedowns
Most of the music on these stations is licensed. The game publishers bought the rights to use the songs inside the game, not to host them elsewhere. I host the audio as a preservation archive on the basis that the game versions are not available anywhere else, but if a rightsholder wants something pulled, that's fine.
Send takedown requests to takedown@gameradioarchive.com with the URL of the file and which rights you're claiming. I'll pull it within 48 hours.
Sources
Per-track summaries on this site are written in our own words but sourced from Wikipedia. Each summary credits the specific Wikipedia article it draws from with an inline link. Station write-ups, DJ details, trivia and quotes are cross-referenced against the Saints Row Fandom wiki before being rewritten in our voice.
If a summary is wrong or missing context, email takedown@gameradioarchive.com and it will be fixed.
Tools
- vgmstream for decoding XACT and Wwise audio
- bnk_pc_extractor for unpacking Volition
.bnk_pcarchives - AcoustID and Chromaprint for song identification
- MusicBrainz for the metadata behind AcoustID
- Custom Python tooling for parsing Volition
.xtbldata tables - Wikipedia for per-track background
- Saints Row Fandom for cross-referencing station details
Contact
For corrections, additions, takedowns or just to chat, email takedown@gameradioarchive.com.