Medieval Music MOD

[LieutenantHawk]

I want to make a MOD that adds the music from a certain Medieval video game to Skyrim, but I just realized that there aren't simple music folders in the Skyrim data like there were in previous Elder Scrolls games. Does anyone know how I could add the audio files to the game with this different setup? Edited December 26, 2011 by LieutenantHawk

[OrphenFire]

It's simple. Just structure your folders for your medieval music just how they are in the music.bsa file. For example, if you want to replace the music for villages and towns, you would find the music for the villages and towns and copy their titles and folder structure. Say you have a song called "Medieval Song 1" and you want to make it the village music. Just rename it to "mus_village_01.xwm" and put it in the proper folders (music/town/). The game randomly chooses music from all of the different songs it has for villages, towns, exploration, dungeons and combat. So you need a good variety of music. I have actually replaced most of the music in Skyrim with LOTR music, and it totaled up to around 60 different songs. I had to recycle some songs. Like, there are so many exploration tunes that I just reused some of the LOTR music.

[Fatalmasterpiece]

I want to make a MOD that adds the music from a certain Medieval video game to Skyrim, but I just realized that there aren't simple music folders in the Skyrim data like there were in previous Elder Scrolls games. Does anyone know how I could add the audio files to the game with this different setup?

there is but you need to extract the .bsa first.

[LieutenantHawk]

It's simple. Just structure your folders for your medieval music just how they are in the music.bsa file. For example, if you want to replace the music for villages and towns, you would find the music for the villages and towns and copy their titles and folder structure. Say you have a song called "Medieval Song 1" and you want to make it the village music. Just rename it to "mus_village_01.xwm" and put it in the proper folders (music/town/). The game randomly chooses music from all of the different songs it has for villages, towns, exploration, dungeons and combat. So you need a good variety of music. I have actually replaced most of the music in Skyrim with LOTR music, and it totaled up to around 60 different songs. I had to recycle some songs. Like, there are so many exploration tunes that I just reused some of the LOTR music.

 

 

I don't want to replace the music though. Will it still choose a random song for the right setting if I just add the proper prefix? Like, if I have a song named "Explore01" and I want to add it with the rest of the explore songs, I can just call it "mus_explore_day_10.wxm" (since the game has 9 daytime exploring songs already)?

 

And yeah, I've got an excellent variety. I'm using the soundtrack from Medieval II: Total War, which is 2.5 hours long, plus the music from its Teutonic expansion, which is 40 minutes. I've cut out a lot of it, but there's still almost two hours of music that I'm going to add. Different dungeon, town/village, and combat music.

[OrphenFire]

I'm not sure if it will automatically detect that "mus_explore_day_10.wxm" is a usable music file. You can try it and see if the song ever plays, but you'll probably have to do a lot of exploring to find out for sure if it's ever going to randomly choose song number 10.

[NoAardvarksAllowed]

I'm not sure if it will automatically detect that "mus_explore_day_10.wxm" is a usable music file. You can try it and see if the song ever plays, but you'll probably have to do a lot of exploring to find out for sure if it's ever going to randomly choose song number 10.

 

To test it, I would add a track to dungeon/fort or dungeon/ice, since they only have two tracks each, and then hang around some fort dungeons or ice caves for a bit. A third added piece of music shouldn't take too long to be chosen by the game, if it will be played at all.

[Sunnie]

There is no functionality in the engine to add additional music and have the game automatically see it and play it.

The music for Skyrim is called from within area from a list of MUST entries (every piece of music has a data record to ID it) determined by where you are and what time of day it is. Music needs to have a MUST record made for it, then it has to be added to the cell records.

[OrphenFire]

I find it odd that they skipped "mus_combat_05.wxm". It goes from 04 and jumps to 06.

[LieutenantHawk]

There is no functionality in the engine to add additional music and have the game automatically see it and play it.

The music for Skyrim is called from within area from a list of MUST entries (every piece of music has a data record to ID it) determined by where you are and what time of day it is. Music needs to have a MUST record made for it, then it has to be added to the cell records.

 

Alright, well, how exactly do I do that?

[Sunnie]

There is no functionality in the engine to add additional music and have the game automatically see it and play it.

The music for Skyrim is called from within area from a list of MUST entries (every piece of music has a data record to ID it) determined by where you are and what time of day it is. Music needs to have a MUST record made for it, then it has to be added to the cell records.

 

Alright, well, how exactly do I do that?

 

I am going to assume you know how to create an empty esp mod file and can use TesSnip, if you don't then look up some of the dozens of threads here and on the Bethsoft forums for how.

You need to create a new MUST record for each additional piece of music you want to add to the game. Once you have proper references to your music you need to create a MUSC record that contains all of the MUST record references that you want to randomly play in a cell. Once you have that finished, find the cell you want to play the previously created music list in, click on the cell header record and find the XCMO subrecord. Edit the hex value in that record to match the refID of your new MUSC record. If everything is entered properly, that cell will now play your music list. You may also have to change the value in the Unknown 3 field of the cell header, but I won't get into that now because it is seriously a huge can of worms/headaches.