Overview

PSX FF7 sound system is tightly connected with PSX SPU implementation. There are 2 main types of sounds in FF7: streaming sound (background noise in video sequences) and tracker sound. Square Enix programmers didn’t use any standard PSX formats such as SEQ, VAB & VAG, they wrote their own custom tracker. Streaming sound is standard PSX XA-ADPCM format, all sound streaming data is in Mode 2 sectors on FF7 CDROM game discs.

The custom tracker is often called AKAO and was programmed by Square Enix sound programmer Minoru Akao. FF7 uses the earliest version of the PlayStation AKAO sound driver.