I would like to write a couple of pieces of music using the sounds from a SNES game. All I need is a way to get samples of the instruments. I've tried recording them (zsnes+audacity), but my crappy sound card adds a lot noise to recording. Is there a way of extracting the sounds from the rom directly? If you have any other ideas as to how I could go about this, let me know.

There's nothing that's going to get samples from the ROM, but you can get samples in use in any given SPC file.

SPCTool will do this.

bsnes won't run the rom for some reason. I tried SNESSOR, but it gave me several junk files, so I want to try the spc option to see if that's more straightforward. I'm not able to find SPCTool anywhere though. I searched the utilities here and zophar's domain. Could someone point me in the right direction.

Thanks for the help.

I was about to reply saying I had found it, but it said someone else had replied 

Like you said, I'm having some trouble getting the program to run. I go to command prompt, enter full screen mode, run the program and this is what I get:

SPC Tool v0.61  Copyright (C)2000 Alpha-II Productions

Usage:  SPCTOOL [options] file

   /V    Non-standard VGA
         Use this if the mouse cursor is garbage
   /J    Japanese character set
   /X    Disable MMX instructions
   /P

• Play only mode

         The default pre-amp level is used if no value is passed (0-99)
   /O    Disable sound card output
   /8    Force 8-bit samples
   /M    Force monaural samples
   /R#   Output sample rate:
         1-8000Hz  2-11025Hz  3-16000Hz  4-22050Hz
         5-32000Hz 6-44100Hz  7-48000Hz  8-64000Hz
   /I#   Default interpolation:
         1-None  2-Linear  3-Cubic Spline

Do not run this program windowed! (see README.HTM)

Then the program exits, and Command Prompt asks me for another command. I don't get a GUI like the readme talks about. Do I need to pass it any arguments or something else to get this to run (I'm on Windows XP by the way)?

Thanks again for the help

Apparently I can't get SPCTool to work correctly on my machine. Unfortunately, half of the screen displays garbage even, with the non-standard VGA option on. I guess I'll have to try something else. Thanks for the advice though.