LE Custom music frustration

[duude98]

Hey! I have been adding some music to my mod recently, and I have been running into some problems I can't find any reference to. Firstly, I have one major worldspace that uses a music type, and then a sub area region in it that uses another, right at the center. I was able to spawn in there once and everything worked fine, but I accidentally changed something and now I ctd whenever I cow into that region or load a save there. This could be another problem entirely, as even when i completely turned off the music in the worldspace, my game ctds when it loads that region. But, strangely enough, I can spawn elsewhere and walk there no problem.

 

This is not the only problem, however. A few other worldspaces did the same thing, and I read that converting the music track from wav to xwm could fix it. I tried this using MultiXwm on one worldspace that only had one track, and it worked, so I converted all the music I added to xwm and changed the directories in TES5Edit. Of course, only the one track I tested it with works. My game still crashes when I spawn in that region, but now none of the music aside from that one track works. Even then, there are spots where I can stand that makes the music duck out and start over when I move out of that area(despite the music type being the highest priority and it being applied to the entire worldspace). I could switch back to the wav files, but that still leaves me with a town that crashes the game when you load there. Is there a max track limit for music types or something? What could be making the game crash in that way? I am very confused.

[Di0nysys]

Did you by any chance edit the musictype by cell? I did that a while back to my hub area, and noticed that i always crashed after leaving and reentering the same area. It's a weird bug in the engine.

Resetting musictype back to default on the cells i edited fixed the crashing. Best way to do what you're doing is creating Regions, and setting a MusicType override for each. Stay with Xwm, it's the better format. Just make sure you're not mixing Wav AND Xwm in the same mod.

[duude98]

I did use regions, I did not edit each cell directly. Also once I spawn into the world in a safe space, that area will not make the game crash, so I don't think its that. I was able to actually get the music working again by changing the xwm bitrate, so maybe the answer lies there.

EDIT: It seems as if changing the bitrate on the xwm fixes the problems with playback, but that region still crashes my game on loading, but I can still walk into it fine and the music now changes correctly again once more. So it would seem that that's unrelated and the title to this thread now no longer makes sense.

EDIT 2: The problem seems to be custom regions, and any region in my worldspace I try to launch the game into causes a ctd for some reason.Completely unrelated to music, it just happened to start happening while music was being messed with

Edited August 7, 2016 by duude98

[duude98]

Apologies for necroing the thread, but this problem has popped up again for me. I realized that a lot of the music I added was too quiet, so I re-imported it into adobe audition, leveled the audio and re-exported, then re-converted everything back into xwm. Now, unmistakably, the game crashes when I load into a worldspace/interior cell/region with custom music, or I travel into one manually.

 

The problem started occurring when I made the changes to the music, but does not seem to be the files themselves. Even when I revert to a backup of the old .xwm files that did work, the game still crashes. I have not tried manually deleting the custom tracks and types and rebuilding them manually, I wanted some input to see if anyone has seen this before/knows of a solution before I do the most drastic thing.

[Di0nysys]

Apologies for necroing the thread, but this problem has popped up again for me. I realized that a lot of the music I added was too quiet, so I re-imported it into adobe audition, leveled the audio and re-exported, then re-converted everything back into xwm. Now, unmistakably, the game crashes when I load into a worldspace/interior cell/region with custom music, or I travel into one manually.

 

The problem started occurring when I made the changes to the music, but does not seem to be the files themselves. Even when I revert to a backup of the old .xwm files that did work, the game still crashes. I have not tried manually deleting the custom tracks and types and rebuilding them manually, I wanted some input to see if anyone has seen this before/knows of a solution before I do the most drastic thing.

There's a ton of reasons for crashing into a cell. Corrupt nif, too many errors in your esp, regions setup incorrectly, etc. Any audio format u use that is other than 44100khz, 16bit will cause the game to crash afaik.

Have you cleaned your plugin?

 

It's a good idea to do source control; ie have a master and merge edits into it, keeping iterations of your different builds. Staying ahead of errors/ITM's/UDR records is always important so you don't build on a faulty foundation. Always clean your plugin. Another good practice is scanning all custom nifs you use with Nifscan. It will indicate if you have corrupt nifs, and what to address to fix them.

[duude98]

If I turn the music types off, everything loads just fine. I have dealt with buggy nifs and this isn't it. I have tried those audio settings in at least two different converters with the same result. Maybe multixwm/skyrim audio converter aren't able to overwrite the old files automatically? But even then that wouldn't explain why the old files that worked now also crash the game...

 

While the method I use for backup isn't that elaborate, I do make iterations in a backup folder every day I edit the plugin, and I did actually try reverting to a backup I made shortly before the change, but no luck. I have also scanned the esp for errors in tes5edit, and it did come up with a few, but none had anything to do with music tracks or types, or anything else that would cause the game to crash.

 

What would be an example of a region being set up incorrectly? What sort of mistakes can you make there?

Edited October 12, 2016 by duude98

[Di0nysys]

What would be an example of a region being set up incorrectly? What sort of mistakes can you make there?

Creating a region for your worldspace in something like the Tamriel world for eg, or overwriting vanilla regions. But my hunch is your audio flles are running at higher bitrate than the game can handle. Remember, converting to XWM retains the format of the Wav file; ie, if ur wav is 48000khz/ 16bit, the xwm will also output at that rate.

 

Make sure the output is correct.

[duude98]

Whelp, once again you were exactly right. It looks like I screwed up something in the original export, the settings I used in skyrim audio converter didn't matter. I would have thought testing the original audio files would have ruled that out, but I must have screwed that experiment up. The exact mistake, in case I end up making it for a third time in the future, was that on export I let the setting for stereo/mono default to whatever the original file's was. I assumed they were mono, but obviously not.

 

Thank you again for your help Di0nysys. Hopefully next time I will think to check these things before posting lol.

[Di0nysys]

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Np man. Audition does that btw. Happens to me every now and then.