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The Portable Sound Format (PSF) is a music file format ripped directly from video games from a variety of video game consoles. The format was originally used for PlayStation video games, but has since been adapted to support other systems.
The PSF format was publicly documented by Neill Corlett in 2003, who also wrote a Winamp plug-in named "Highly Experimental" that plays PSF1 and PSF2 files.
Generally, PSF files contain a number of samples and a music sequencer player program. This takes far less space than an equivalent streamed format of the same music (WAV, MP3) while still sounding high fidelity. Background music stored in PSF files can usually be looped forever, as the sequencer handles its own loop points.
Several PSF sub-formats also have a miniPSF/PSFlib capability, wherein data used by multiple tracks is stored only once in an accompanying PSFlib file. Further differences are stored in a miniPSF file, which can be compressed via zlib to further increase storage efficiency.
A PSF2 file is the PlayStation 2 equivalent of a PSF. PSF2 is internally structured as a file system, rather than PSF, which is a single PS executable. PSF's native sample rate is 44,100 Hz, while PSF2's is 48,000 Hz. Rates may vary from 8,000 Hz to 96,000 Hz.
Both PSF and PSF2 files contain a header which specifies the type of video game system the file contains data for, and an optional set of tags at the end which can give detailed information such as game name, artist and length.