Ripping

Ripping, in the context of video games, is the process of extracting songs from a game, therefore "ripping" the songs from the files of the game, completely unmodified.

On the SiIvaGunner channel, however, instead of being straight video game music, the songs featured on the channel are generally remixed, or involved in a mashup with other songs or memes. These "rips" are submitted to the channel and vetted by members of the SiIvaGunner team.

Official guide
In July 2017, Matsu Muhō released the official guide to making rips in the Reddit thread "At long last, I proudly present: The SiIvaGunner Official Ripping Guide!". The guide mostly deals with melody changes and ripping.

The guide is hosted on Matsu's website at https://wildmatsu.xyz/ripguide. It is also backed up on SiIvaGunner's official website at https://highquality.rip/ripguide, but the content is not properly formatted and still presented from Matsu's point of view.

Matsu's guide is divided into seven parts:
 * Part 0: Ethics – concerning the moral and legal implications of ripping, transcribing and music production, and the concept of the MIDI slap
 * Part 1: The Idea – concerning the process of creating a workable idea for a melody swap, the basic technical elements involved in harmonically and structurally matching melody and accompaniment, and testing beforehand whether an idea will work
 * Part 2: Tools – concerning software used in the ripping community for music production, including DAWs (digital audio workstations) like FL Studio and REAPER, and other editing tools like Audacity and Sekaiju
 * Part 3: Getting Editable Music – concerning the difference between streamed and sequenced music, and the methods and software used in editing sequenced music from several consoles (as well as a handful of specific games with specialized tools)
 * Part 4: Identifying Key – concerning methods of identifying tonality and changing the tonality of a melody
 * Part 5: Quality – concerning note lengths, accuracy, and the process of exporting audio files
 * Part 6: Conclusion – suggestions, further reading and acknowledgements

Although it is one of the only official resources available, Matsu's guide is fairly limited in scope, and omits certain details, such as the processes involved in making arrangements, mashups, non-mashup rips of streamed music, and visuals.

Other resources
Other team members have also occasionally published information and software related to ripping.
 * SilvaGunner Starter Kit
 * "Accurate SNES Ripping Guide" by pedipanol
 * The High Quality Podcast: "Episode 4 - ft. 123zc" (discussion of ripping from 56:02 to 59:18) by New Guy and 123zc
 * VGMTrans-qt fork (Windows, macOS, Linux) by sykhro
 * GBA Mus Ripper fork (Windows) by berg8793

Submissions
In order to get rips uploaded onto the channel, contributors who are not part of the SiIvaGunner team submit their rips to the channel via email. Depending on the size of the channel's backlog, it may take up to a month or two for rips to get responses. If a rip fits for an upcoming channel event, it may be responded to sooner.

Part of the SiIvaGunner team, QoC ("Quality of Control"; named such as an in-joke), performs quality checks on new submissions from both team members and fans. If a rip submission is ultimately judged to be accurate and of high quality, then the submitter will receive an acceptance email and the rip will be placed in the internal queue; if it is judged to have fixable issues, then the submitter will receive an email with suggestions or instructions for improvement; and in most other cases, the submitter is not contacted.

History
With the release of Main Theme - Superman 64 in August 2016, the SiIvaGunner channel explained their submission rules. These rules were later expanded, first in December 2016 with "YOU can join the fight! - A Recruitment Video from The Voice", then in March 2019 with "The Haltmann Works Co. Training Video (Emailing Rips, Art, and King for Another Day Contestants!)".

In July 2017, Matsu Muhō posted a Reddit thread called "At long last, I proudly present: The SiIvaGunner Official Ripping Guide!", which linked to the Voice's recruitment video and included several more tips on submitting to the channel.

Basic rules

 * Contributions to the SiIvaGunner channel are anonymous and uncredited, and contributors are only credited on albums if the rips are released there. It is advised to put the sentence "I understand all submissions are anonymous and I will not be credited" to save the team the trouble of asking.
 * Emails must follow the following format :
 * To: highqualityrips(at)gmail(dot)com
 * Subject: Song Name - Game Name
 * Body:

Song Name - Game Name Music: Composer: Playlist: Platform:

Joke: (explain the joke clearly)
 * link to rip*

I understand that this is an anonymous submission.


 * The link must be an external link (not an email attachment) . It is strongly recommended to upload it to Google Drive, since it's the easiest way to make a backup of email submissions. After uploading a file to Google Drive, please right-click the file and choose "Get shareable link".
 * If for whatever reason you absolutely cannot use Google Drive, please use the following:
 * picosong.com (as of Oct 26th 2019, picosong.com is no longer available and has shut down).
 * instaud.io (as of September 2019, instaud.io is no longer available and has shut down).
 * my.namejeff.com (as of March 2021, my.namejeff.com is no longer available and has shut down).
 * clyp.it (with downloads enabled)
 * Note: ZippyShare is no longer recommended due to the frequent purging of hosted files.

Not recommended

 * Rips that contain out-of-key notes/vocals (unless that’s the joke)
 * Rips that go out of sync/beat (unless that's the joke)
 * Rips that contain low quality audio (unless that’s the joke)
 * Ripping a song which has already been ripped multiple times (more than 2) on our channel. In general, the more times a song has been ripped, the higher the standards are for it.
 * straight MIDI swaps/slaps (aka downloading a midi and putting a soundfont on it with no changes)
 * slapping a melody over a song verbatim without adjusting the backing music or melody itself to compensate
 * Any song/audio/footage that will get your video blocked in a lot of countries. (eg. Kanye West/Drake)
 * Rips of licensed songs (unless the song is heavily associated with the game)

Banned

 * Rips titled under:
 * "Title Theme - The Flintstones: The Rescue of Dino & Hoppy"
 * "Snow halation - Love Live! School idol festival"
 * "DK Rap - Donkey Kong 64"
 * Rips of songs by Morimori Atsushi (copyright)
 * Rips using any direct audio from the Re:CREATORS soundtrack unless modified heavily (copyright)
 * Rips featuring Power Rangers/Super Sentai show footage (copyright)
 * Rips that have already been published publicly elsewhere, in particular other channels or SoundCloud (may be waived if the upload has few views)
 * Anything related to The Jetsons
 * Rips using Protegent Rap