Morroblivion ate my music!

[TenShadows]

So I played Morroblivion for a good while, and it replaced most of the Oblivion music... but when I returned to vanilla, it wouldn't return the stuff. It kept all of it. All that was left was a couple dungeon tracks, a single fight track, and an explore track, and for the rest of the time it was silence.

 

I downloaded a whole bunch of music out of Nexus, but for some reason, most of those won't play either. Every single music folder has a dozen tracks right now, minimum - Battle and Explore have way more - yet I keep hearing the same one or two. And the originals are still gone.

 

What gives?

[TenShadows]

I feel like the mod ate something else than the music files - some essential little file somewhere that made them work in the first place. Any idea what that was, and where I'd need to go to find a replacement?

[LFact]

The music files are in \(Whateverfolder)\Oblivion\Data\Music\ as normal mp3 files.

If the music is truly replaced, all you can do is reinstall the game unless you made backup of vanilla data files. (Well, if you're on steam, you don't need to reinstall the whole game...)

[TenShadows]

The music files are in \(Whateverfolder)\Oblivion\Data\Music\ as normal mp3 files.

If the music is truly replaced, all you can do is reinstall the game unless you made backup of vanilla data files. (Well, if you're on steam, you don't need to reinstall the whole game...)

Yes, I know where the music files are. It's where I've been putting my custom music, only some of which plays. And I don't know why. Nowhere does it even hint that there could be more involved in this stuff than sticking your own custom music into the folders.

[RomanR]

Perhaps the problem is how your custom music is encoded? All vanilla music is encoded in 192 kb/s constant and as stereo (as my Media Info utility says). Maybe is problem with naming (does filenames contain some special characters or too many dots)? Some mod can use StreamMusic command to play a file which author wanted too.

 

I don't know what capabilities of Oblivion for playing mp3 are (max kb/s and other parameters), but for now I would advice to check your mp3 files if there is something out of order or try to rename them for simplier name, like Battle_xx. Again, some mods could want to play certain file, so don't rename them mindlesly.

 

Or you are simply victim of Oblivion's randomizer. Game randomizers are often pseudo-randomizers rather than true ones (same for many Basics in 8-bits), so you can be just out of luck.

[TenShadows]

I'm renaming the songs as we speak. Many of them are indeed encoded at different speeds, but that was never a problem before. Might be a new Windows thing.

 

Is there a program or something I could use to re-encode them all at the same speed?

[RomanR]

My utilities to convert audio are ancient, dating back to WinXP times. But I comfirmed that Audiozilla works as intended as I'm writing this, tested it on original Battle_01 music. I converted it to wav first, then to mp3 with my settings and lastly played in Media Player to see a result.

 

Don't forget that mp3 is a lossy compresion, so keep your original file with higher quality and work with its copy.

 

Edit: Or Format Factory can be used too. But I believe there are ton of more modern software for this task.

Edited September 23, 2022 by RomanR

[TenShadows]

Based on what little I managed to convert with Audiozilla before the free trial expired, it doesn't look like much has changed: the bitrate is the same with a few more files but they still don't play.

[DrakeTheDragon]

Maybe worth mentioning Oblivion's also silently ignoring any properly encoded MP3 files with meta data attached, i.e. album, author etc.

 

To fix this there's been tools linked to in these forums for removal of this data.

 

Maybe I can unearth one of those links, or someone else coming by in the meantime knows which could be used.

[RomanR]

@DrakeTheDragon:

 

Ah, that's new for me. For me it's strange as Morrowind doesn't have this problem. Will be enough to edit them with programs like MP3Tag or they need be completely removed by special utility?

 

If it's this problem, it can be confirmed by simple experiment. If TenShadows temporaly moves out the music (for example dungeon type) to somewhere else and with his custom music (with tags) staying, the result would be a silence when entering cave/fortress etc.

 

Edit: However that's why I mentioned Audiozilla first, this program has settings for every file type, including creating mp3 tags. Besides with creating wav from original mp3 first these tags shouldn't be created anyway.

Edited September 23, 2022 by RomanR