Extract text from Nintendo sound archives (BFSAR)
To convert BFSAR sound archives to another format, you need Switch Toolbox or other Game software.
To convert other file formats to the "Nintendo Sound Archive" file type, you need software like Switch Toolbox or a similar tool.
A .BFSAR file is a proprietary Binary File Sound Archive used internally by modern Nintendo consoles like the Wii U and Nintendo Switch. It acts as a massive data container holding thousands of sound effects, background music streams, and instrument banks for popular games like Mario Kart 8 and Splatoon.
Modders and data miners typically use specialized homebrew software like VGMToolbox or Switch Toolbox to unpack the contents of a .BFSAR archive. To play the extracted audio files on a standard PC, users rely on Foobar2000 paired with the vgmstream component plugin.
Because it is a closed-source game asset, you cannot open a .BFSAR file with standard archive utilities like WinRAR or 7-Zip, nor can you play it directly in a media player like VLC. The file is not an audio track itself, but a custom file system. Inside the archive, the actual audio is stored in secondary Nintendo formats like BFWAV (Wave files) and BFSTM (Stream Sounds).
To convert this data into a usable format, you must first extract the internal BFWAV or BFSTM files. Once extracted, those individual tracks can be converted into standard WAV, MP3, or OGG audio formats, though some looping metadata might be lost in the process.
This file format is exceptionally difficult to open or convert because of its nested, proprietary architecture. Standard online converters will fail instantly because they expect a single audio track, not a custom game file system. If our analysis detects supported underlying or embedded formats, viewing or conversion may still be possible.
Convert.Guru analyzes your BFSAR file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted BFSTM, BFWAV, MP3, BRSAR and WAV files.
If you want to convert BFSAR file to MP3, WAV, AAC, FLAC, OGG, WMA, M4A, AIFF, OPUS, ALAC, APE or WV, you can use Switch Toolbox or similar software from the "Game Sound Audio Archive" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert MIDI, AAC, TTA, AU, WV, DTS, MID, FLAC, RA, MP3, PCM or WAV files to BFSAR, try Switch Toolbox or another comparable tool in the "Game Sound Audio Archive" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our BFSAR converter.