Ripping a Sound File from a .exe

[Ramor]

So, this may sound really weird, but I've had this keygen for a while (i don't even remember what it's for) because it has a really awesome song that plays whenever you open it up, i have no way to figure out who did this particular track and whatever and it's been bugging me

anyway down to business, is there anyway i can possibly rip just the mp3/wav/midi or whatever it may be from the program? all it is is a .exe and nothing else came with it, is there any easy way for me to make this shit happen? i really want to be able to just throw it into a playlist rather than having to open up a keygen to hear it >.>

[SephYuyX]

lol, ive a few keygens like that too.

There really is no one way to do it, all .exes are different by the way they are packaged. Some can be easily opened with winrar, or renamed to .cab and opened that way.

You could also try Resource Hacker or Process Monitor to see if the .exe accesses/dumps anything to where you can easily grab it. You can also reverse engineer some .exes with a dev. ver. of instalsheild. Even if you do manage to get the .exe apart, be prepared to dig through even more things, 99 out of 100 times, .exes arent just files thrown together in an executable format. They consist of .dlls, .cabs and other goodies where you need to dig down even further.

One easy soloution would be to just record it with sound recorder by turning Stero Mix on in volume control recording properties.

[Norellicus]

Stereo mix/"what you hear" is likely to be the least painful way to make this happen. Turn that on, open sound recorder, start recording, open app, stop sound recorder.

[Zosi]

Stereo mix/"what you hear" is likely to be the least painful way to make this happen. Turn that on, open sound recorder, start recording, open app, stop sound recorder.

This. Keygens usually use have their music generated by code, it's a sign of elegance and skill within the scene. Including an MP3 or even a MIDI or MOD would be viewed as a horrible noob mistake.

Also, stub executables with archive files attached aren't really that common outside of packaged installers. The reason you can rename those to an archive extension and open them is simply because the PE format and ZIP/7Z/CAB/RAR formats don't conflict. PE is picky, it demands that executables start with a magic number (0x5A4D, or MZ in ASCII) and DOS stub, but archives generally store their index at the end of a file in order to make it easier to grow. Installers and self-extractors are basically just a stub and an archive smashed together with the equivalent of DOS's copy /B. That's fairly uncommon outside of making packaged installers, because the advantages of having your data separate from your code outweigh the aesthetic advantage of having one neat little file.

Edit: Scripts fed through something like py2exe (for Python) can also end up using the same technique, but most Python software I've seen uses a separate lib folder or library.zip and keeps as little in the actual executable as possible. Same reason as above, it's a bitch to maintain stuff that's just jammed together into one file.