jorgeelalto / unnks

nks and nkx archive unpacker

unnks

nks and nkx archive unpacker

Introduction

unnks extracts data from nks and nkx archives, which are commonly used by several music synthesis programs. It has a similar interface to GNU tar. Instead of doing

tar -xvf archive.tar,

just do

unnks -xvf archive.nks,

or optionally

unnks -C output_dir -xvf archive.nks.

In addition to the unnks program, this package contains the utilities nks-scan, nks-ls-libs, and the libnks library.

nks-scan can be used to display the structure of a nks/nkx archive. It was used during development to discover the meaning of unknown bytes in archives.

nks-ls-libs displays all the sample packages you have installed on your computer that it can find, and their nkx archive encryption keys. It is only present on Windows and Mac OS X. See the "nkx support" section for how to use this tool to add support for more nkx archives to unnks.

libnks is a library useful to programmers, which provides an interface to the code that unnks uses internally to access archives. If you want to add nks/nkx support to your GPLv3+ program, then you may use libnks to accomplish it. Be warned however, that the API/ABI may change in future releases without warning.

nkx support

nkx files are different from nks files in that each archive may have its own encryption key needed to extract the contents. These keys are usually supplied as part of the package containing the archives, but the exact location may vary and is dependant on the host operating system: on Windows, the keys may be kept in the registry, on Mac OS X in application property files. There is no universal and platform-independent way of accessing these. This is why unnks contains a database of known packages with nkx archives and how to obtain their keys. Currently, archives from the following packages are supported:

• Acoustic Legends HD
• Ambience Impacts Rhythms
• BASiS
• Chris Hein Bass
• Chris Hein - Guitars
• Chris Hein Horns Vol 2
• Drums Overkill
• Ethno World 4
• Evolve
• Evolve Mutations
• Galaxy II
• Garritan Instruments for Finale
• Gofriller Cello
• Keyboard Collection
• Kreate
• Mr. Sax T
• Ocean Way Drums Expandable
• Ocean Way Drums Gold
• OTTO
• Phaedra
• Prominy SC Electric Guitar
• Solo Strings Advanced
• Steven Slate Drums Platinum
• Stradivari Solo Violin
• String Essentials
• Symphobia
• syntAX
• The Elements
• The Trumpet
• VI.ONE
• Vir2 Elite Orchestral Percussion

If you want to unpack an unsupported nkx archive, you may try to use the nks-ls-libs tool supplied with unnks to list the packages installed on your computer, along with their nkx archive encryption keys. If you then email this information to unavowed at vexillium org, it will be included in the next version of unnks.

Limitations

1. Only extracting or listing archives is supported; unnks does not create new archives.

2. The archives to be extracted must be seekable files. Extracting from stdin or other non-seekable streams is not supported.

Thanks

Thanks to Gynvael Coldwind for pointing out bugs in the code, and to Steffan Andrews for all the help with discovering how to extract nkx files and then testing whether it actually worked.

Also thanks to all those who reported bugs, sent encryption key information and in general sent emails about this project.