Adding custom music to Oblivion Remastered

[EluneGoddess]

Scholarly work. So then a relatively simple UE4SS plugin or PAK file might actually end up being the solution to this. I'll keep an eye on your findings!

[jonrellim]

On 4/27/2025 at 1:55 PM, Greatlance420 said:

FOUND A SOLUTION!!!

This is NOT easy though, and does take some time. I have only tested this for the menu music and so far, it works. I am doing this on windows and it was a hassle to get this going, I have been trying to get this to work for 10 hours straight and drank 8 bottles of IBC root beer.

First you will need some applications

Fmodel(You need this to view and extract the pak)-FModel

UnrealPak(This will repackage the newly made .pak file)-unrealpak/README.md at main · RiotOreO/unrealpak · GitHub

Wwise(You will need to make an account and download the program, you cannot make a .wem file without this)-Overview | Audiokinetic

Sound2wem(Turns your mp3 file into a .wem file)-GitHub - EternalLeo/sound2wem: Converts audio file to Wwise Audio (.wem)

ffmpeg(Needed for sound2wem to work)-FFmpeg

Once you have all these downloaded and unzipped/installed, its time to get the process going.

First, make sure you have your custom song on standby as an mp3. Next, drag that mp3 onto the zSound2wem command script directly. This will have a command be started and it will convert the mp3 to a .wem file. Keep this .wem file somewhere you can remember on your computer(desktop, documents, etc.)

Second, open Fmodel and you will need it to detect a new game manually(In this case, Oblivion remastered). Click on "ADD UNDETECTED GAME" and in the directory, go to the file where OblivionRemastered-Windows.pak is located (should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Oblivion Remastered\OblivionRemastered\Content). Then press the little blue add button, opening up the file and showing whats in it. This will show the OblivionRemastered-Windows.pak we want. Double click on it and it should show 2 folders: Engine (Which has the Unreal logo) and OblivionRemastered. You need to export BOTH of these. Right click on the OblivionRemastered folder and choose "Export Folder's Packages Raw Data". This is going to take a few minutes so dont panic if at first it doesn't seem to be working, just let it do its job. You will see a yellow bar at the bottom of the program that says "loading" or something like that (I cant remember it was 9 hours ago) and it will go back to blue once it has exported the entire folder. Then do the same thing for Engine.

Third, once they are both exported, go into the Fmodel folder and then the Output folder. In here you will find the "Exports" folder, and this is very important. In here you will have 2 folders: Engine and OblivionRemastered, just like in the steam directory. Now open the folder path OblivionRemastered/Content/WwiseAudio/Media. You will see a bunch of .wem files on your screen and a folder that says a language (In my case, English). Sort them by name and look for 496000234.wem, this is the main menu music the game calls from! Now keep it right there and go back to that converted mp3 to wem file(the custom one) and rename it EXACTLY to 496000234.wem. Now take it and drag it into the Media folder with all those .wem files. If you did this right, it will ask if you want to overwrite the original 496000234.wem file with the new custom one. Overwrite/Replace it and there you go! Custom menu music (but we are not done yet).

Fourth, this part is really tricky so follow closely and carefully. Once you successfully replaced the .wem file, you now need to repackage the .pak file. Open up the folder that has the unrealpak-main and look for the batch file called "UnrealPak-Without-Compression"(I have not used the one with compression so I wouldn't recommend using that one). Then go back to the "Exports" folder (the one containing Engine and OblivionRemastered) and drag it ontop/directly onto that batch file. A command window should pop up saying it has the information and is converting it to a pak file. This will take about 30 seconds to a minute to complete. Once its done, the Exports.pak file will be in the "Output" folder with the new Exports.pak right above the "Exports" folder. Now take this .pak file and rename it EXACTLY to OblivionRemastered-Windows and take it to where the original .pak is located (steam directory). Replace the old pak file with the new one you just made.

Now run the game and test the new file. If all was done correctly, you'll have new music once the menu pops up!

This is very tricky but so far is the only way to do this until somebody makes a program to make this easier (or we get mod tools). You technically could overwrite any of those .wem files to whatever audio you want, but you'd have to go through every single one in Fmodel to figure out which ones are music, ambience, sounds, speaking, etc. I only figured out what the specific menu music .wem file was by reading this post by zzenuss, so shout out to that guy!-Oblivion Remastered High Quality Music at Oblivion Remastered Nexus - Mods and community (nexusmods.com)

With all that said, after spending hours with no sleep using different programs and methods to get custom music, I have finally cracked the code and now we have custom music. Hope this guide helps and gets spread around so somebody can come up with an easier solution. If people are still confused and I get enough replies, I'll make a video tutorial on the process. Anyways, i have to go now because im already 42 minutes late to work.

Awesome work, I've tried this as well and can confirm it works. I have a few notes on this however.

You do not need to extract and repackage the entire "OblivionRemastered-Windows.pak" file with all the contents. All you have to do is create the folder structure in your mod folder ("OblivionRemastered\Content\WwiseAudio\Media"), put the replaced "496000234.wem" file in the correct folder, and repackage the mod folder as a .pak file using the bat script (with compression seems to be fine as well). Then you put that modded pak file into your game folder at "\Oblivion Remastered\OblivionRemastered\Content\Paks\~mods". End your mod pak filename with _P to have it automatically loaded when the game starts. That's it. 

[Noobatron22]

At this time, I can indeed confirm that music_global_play.bnk is the key file that dictates much of the music logic in-game via events (Battle/Public/Explore/etc.); replacing the file with an eventless one and testing in-game played no music at all anywhere. All custom music mods must include a custom generated music_global_play.bnk (Soundbank created with Wwise) with events tied to their tracks and that should theoretically solve the music cutoff issue (still in the process of figuring out which does which with Wwise and how to do so); said file will go in OblivionRemastered/Content/WwiseAudio/Event in your .pak file.

 

Do keep in mind that you must also include the music you don't intend to replace/add to (even if it is a simple main menu music replacement mod, you have to add all the other Battle/Public/Explore events and tie those to the vanilla files) or else all other music tracks will simply not play. Special thanks to Tyrael75 for helping figure this one out.

[EluneGoddess]

12 hours ago, Noobatron22 said:

Do keep in mind that you must also include the music you don't intend to replace/add to (even if it is a simple main menu music replacement mod, you have to add all the other Battle/Public/Explore events and tie those to the vanilla files) or else all other music tracks will simply not play. Special thanks to Tyrael75 for helping figure this one out.

 

So this essentially means that if you decide to make your own custom music_global_play.bnk - You can just gut the Battle portion and the tricks just simply won't play, leaving your current track running even when combat is triggered?

[Noobatron22]

12 minutes ago, EluneGoddess said:

 

So this essentially means that if you decide to make your own custom music_global_play.bnk - You can just gut the Battle portion and the tricks just simply won't play, leaving your current track running even when combat is triggered?

You just don't add the event that sets off the battle music when you go into combat.

[Tyrael75]

2 hours ago, EluneGoddess said:

 

So this essentially means that if you decide to make your own custom music_global_play.bnk - You can just gut the Battle portion and the tricks just simply won't play, leaving your current track running even when combat is triggered?

I'm looking into a working UE project for the game and will report what I discover for audio replacements, as of right now simply replacing the wems lets them play but once they reach the end of the games chosen audio file it will cut off completely or start up on oblivions music instead, this currently doesn't matter too much for simple replacers such as discovering a new location, the level up sound or the death jingle as those are called once per event and do not need to loop or choose another audio file. This is what I'm working on so we can properly replace the games music and add entirely new audio to the game so that mod creators can add new sounds, voice lines and custom music without replacing existing ones.

 

Edit: Making your own sound banks is the step in the right direction but we also need a uasset and a way to properly link our audio to the events in game instead of trying to completely override what the game already has, so the general idea is to basically replace ALL the music with our own if that's what you want to do.

[Noobatron22]

Fighting the modern search engines on information for properly adding the .bnk file and setting events to tie in to the .uasset file, it appears the opposite is done instead: you create the .uasset file using the Unreal Editor and a .bnk file is created after; I've dug up some relevant links that might help make things more clear.

Event-Based Packaging Process Overview

Unreal Engine 5 and Wwise Integration (Blueprint & C++)

[DobermanandTiger1]

On 5/3/2025 at 5:57 PM, jonrellim said:

Awesome work, I've tried this as well and can confirm it works. I have a few notes on this however.

You do not need to extract and repackage the entire "OblivionRemastered-Windows.pak" file with all the contents. All you have to do is create the folder structure in your mod folder ("OblivionRemastered\Content\WwiseAudio\Media"), put the replaced "496000234.wem" file in the correct folder, and repackage the mod folder as a .pak file using the bat script (with compression seems to be fine as well). Then you put that modded pak file into your game folder at "\Oblivion Remastered\OblivionRemastered\Content\Paks\~mods". End your mod pak filename with _P to have it automatically loaded when the game starts. That's it. 

What do you name the folder since you can't use \. "OblivionRemastered\Content\WwiseAudio\Media" I've tried adding - and _, even nothing added to it, and I still cannot get the menu music to change from Oblivions music. And do you only put in the 496000234.wem file into the new folder then repackage it? I've tried both ways from your comment and the one you replied to and neither worked, and I'm not sure what I am doing wrong. Any help would be appreciated.