Free online USM to WAV converter

Games and media tools often store cutscene audio inside CRI Middleware USM files, while audio editors and standard players usually require WAV. Converting requires extracting the embedded audio stream and decoding its codec, not simply renaming the file extension.

What the USM format is

USM is a proprietary CRI Middleware Sofdec container used mainly by video games for multiplexed cutscenes. A single file can contain video, one or more audio streams, subtitles, and game-specific metadata. Game development tools and engines using CRI Middleware create USM files; players commonly encounter them in installed game directories or extracted game assets.

The audio inside a USM file is commonly encoded as HCA or ADX, although the exact stream depends on the game and CRI Middleware version. USM is therefore a container, not an audio format that every media converter can decode directly.

What the WAV format is

WAV is a RIFF-based container commonly used for uncompressed PCM audio. It is supported by DAWs, sample editors, video editors, operating systems, and archival workflows.

WAV preserves the decoded sample data without adding another lossy compression stage, but it produces much larger files than HCA or ADX. Use it when an editor or audio tool needs a standard PCM source, when you need waveform editing, or when compatibility is more important than storage size.

How to actually convert USM to WAV

The most practical desktop option is vgmstream, which can decode many game-audio formats and may read the embedded audio in a USM file directly.

1. Install a current build of vgmstream that includes vgmstream-cli.
2. Place the USM file in a folder and make a backup before processing it.
3. Run this command from a terminal:
   vgmstream-cli -o output.wav input.usm
4. Open output.wav in an audio editor or media player and verify that the correct stream was extracted.

If the file contains several audio streams, list or select the required stream with the vgmstream command-line options; for example, -s 2 selects stream 2 when the build reports multiple streams. Some USM files are not accepted directly. In that case, first use a compatible USM demultiplexer to extract the embedded HCA or ADX stream, then decode that extracted file with vgmstream:

1. Run the demultiplexer on input.usm and identify the generated audio stream.
2. Decode the extracted file, for example:
   vgmstream-cli -o output.wav extracted_audio.hca
3. Repeat for each audio stream that must be converted.

For a no-install option, upload the file to the free converter on 101convert.com, select WAV as the output format, and download the result if the service recognizes that particular USM variant.

Quality and compatibility limitations

Converting to WAV does not restore detail discarded when the original HCA or ADX stream was encoded as lossy audio. It only decodes the existing stream into PCM. The output sample rate, channel count, and bit depth are determined by the source; changing them during export changes the PCM representation but cannot improve the source quality.

A USM can contain multiple languages, music, effects, or commentary tracks. Selecting the wrong stream can produce an apparently valid WAV with different content. Some games also use encrypted, modified, or unsupported USM variants, in which case the file must be decrypted or handled with a game-specific extraction tool before audio decoding.