TUTORIAL: Adding/Replacing Music with the Creation Kit

[jimmycalhoun]

Do you all have the hi res texture pack enabled? I have a friend that was able to reproduce the issue you all describe, and when he disabled the hi res texture pack it started working.

 

Nope, I don't have the high-res texture pack yet.

 

So if I understand correctly, we have confirmed that the problem ISN'T with our individual audio files --- it's not something like the file being too large/long or the file being broken from conversion to .wav. That at least narrows it down...but I'm still stumped.

 

One thing I tried doing was, instead of making a NEW Music Track, I just edited one that already exists (in this case Combat01). That way literally the only thing changing is the music data file, and not like any references or dependencies. But then I encountered a problem I hadn't encountered yet: I can't save the .esp file! If I hit Save, it appears to be saving, but it never finishes. If I attempt to close, it asks me if I want to save, and if I hit yes, it then says like, "unable to save as the previous save hasn't finished yet." And it just sits in this never ending loop, and ultimately I just can't save. This was in a brand new .esp file, nothing else had been changed except the music file that Combat01 was pointing to.

 

Another thing I just want to make sure is, in our "music" folder, does it matter if "music" is capitalized or not? I tried both "Music" and "music", and it didn't seem to make a difference, but it would be nice to know for future reference whether or not both are okay.

 

That's weird. I've heard some people say that a plugin can take a while to save. They waited and waited and then it finally finished saving. Path's aren't case sensitive, so it shouldn't matter.

[greenmachine8885]

Looking at the playlist MUSTownTest, all the tracks listed have conditions associated with them. Although I don't really expect it to work, I'm going to emulate those night and day conditions on my new tracks and see what happens. Will post results later. We WILL figure this thing out.

[CptSupermrkt]

Looking at the playlist MUSTownTest, all the tracks listed have conditions associated with them. Although I don't really expect it to work, I'm going to emulate those night and day conditions on my new tracks and see what happens. Will post results later. We WILL figure this thing out.

 

Glad to see someone is as enthusiastic about this as I am :D I probably wouldn't be interested in making custom content if I couldn't play it to custom music. Let us know how it goes. I'm gonna give it another shot when I get home tonight as well.

[greenmachine8885]

Well now. My creation kit has been "saving" (crashing) for about 30 minutes now.... so I'm just going to let it run its course for tonight and see what happens some other time. But before I hit the hay, I want to share my thoughts on a possible solution for all this trouble.

 

I know relatively little about modding and the creation kit, but my foray into the G.E.C.K. and Fallout 3 taught me about load order, which is something I want to talk about here. First, a quick overview of what I understand. Or don't understand. There is a distinct possibility that I am completely wrong about all of this, in which case, you have permission to openly mock me. ANYWAY, load order. Everything in a Bethesda game comes with a hexadecimal tag such as 0052A478, or anything resembling that. The important thing is the first two characters, 00. This number identifies it as having to do with skyrim.esm. The next mod in your load order (for me it is update.esm) consists of its own data, and everything it adds starts with 01. All mods in your load order are listed in ascending order according to that rule, meaning that if you have 38 mods, your 38th mod would add hexidecimal data such as 385D921F.

 

If I am correct about this, then I have to ask/wonder why every time I import a song, its hexadecimal number starts with 01. My instinct tells me that i may have better results if i perhaps rearranged my mod in the load order, to be directly under Skyrim.esm and therefore the 01 defining my music would be correct. The game would then successfully find my music in the 01 mod in my order when it goes to search. Is this a valid idea?

[alasdairhurst]

Yeah i've replicated all these problems too :P I edit certain tracks and it gets stuck saving, although recently i can save now and that actually works! the problem is we need new tracks and not edited ones, but it proves that file paths and file properties are not the problem here.

 

If I am correct about this, then I have to ask/wonder why every time I import a song, its hexadecimal number starts with 01. My instinct tells me that i may have better results if i perhaps rearranged my mod in the load order, to be directly under Skyrim.esm and therefore the 01 defining my music would be correct. The game would then successfully find my music in the 01 mod in my order when it goes to search. Is this a valid idea?

 

hmm, that seems like a valid point. i'll give that a test. If it's looking for something in update.esm then it may crash. Usually the load order formID changes dynamically though depending on where it is. The CK is bugged so it may well be the problem.

 

 

 

#edit

Well, there's the problem :P I loaded skyrim.esm and update.esm, created a new plugin and then loaded a new game with the new plugin right after the two and it worked fine. then i moved it down and it crashed. problem solved (partially at least)

Edited February 13, 2012 by alasdairhurst

[CptSupermrkt]

#edit

Well, there's the problem :P I loaded skyrim.esm and update.esm, created a new plugin and then loaded a new game with the new plugin right after the two and it worked fine. then i moved it down and it crashed. problem solved (partially at least)

 

Damn, considering this is the only plugin I have started so far, there's no other place to put it in terms of priority, so my problem must be different. Although I just realized I'm not using update.esm at all, I haven't loaded that once yet. Will give that a shot in a bit.

[Hubbin0]

Alright, in my case, trying to run jimmycalhoun's mod with any other mods (high-res textures, Space Core, Sounds of Skyrim, and Essential Followers) makes the game crash when entering a town. Disabling all those mods allows the LOTR track to play without any errors. And yes, I had the mod set to load after Update.esm and before those other mods.

 

So there's that problem, and also with my own music mod, none of the tracks I added in there will play. The game doesn't crash, but those tracks are being skipped or something. I still have my other mods disabled, but I still can't get it to work. What is jimmycalhoun using to convert his MP3s to WAV? I used Switch Sound File Converter.

 

Edit: And now I just tried to add jimmycalhoun's music to the Town playlist in my own mod, and the game crashed again. The other mods are still disabled.

Edited February 13, 2012 by Hubbin0

[greenmachine8885]

So far, I've been erasing all the default music in TownTest, leaving only new tracks to be played. This may be helpful to you if the game is skipping your music. Make it so that the game must choose between playing your music, or playing no music at all. (At least for testing purposes. I understand the desire to keep original music in the playlist for the final version of your mod.)

[jimmycalhoun]

Alright, in my case, trying to run jimmycalhoun's mod with any other mods (high-res textures, Space Core, Sounds of Skyrim, and Essential Followers) makes the game crash when entering a town. Disabling all those mods allows the LOTR track to play without any errors. And yes, I had the mod set to load after Update.esm and before those other mods.

 

So there's that problem, and also with my own music mod, none of the tracks I added in there will play. The game doesn't crash, but those tracks are being skipped or something. I still have my other mods disabled, but I still can't get it to work. What is jimmycalhoun using to convert his MP3s to WAV? I used Switch Sound File Converter.

 

Edit: And now I just tried to add jimmycalhoun's music to the Town playlist in my own mod, and the game crashed again. The other mods are still disabled.

 

This is crazy, all kinds of random results for what seems like should be a simple mod. I used dbpoweramp to do my conversion.

 

Your last comment, adding a new track to the town playlist should be working also. I did the same thing and tested it by entering and leaving a town over and over until my custom track started playing.

 

This load order business sounds promising. alasdairhurst, so you used the nmm to set the load order to skyrim.esm, update.esm, then the music mod? When you say moved it down, do you mean you moved the music mod to before the other two?

 

EDIT: Ok so i was finally able to reproduce the issue you all are seeing by installing another mod (hi res texture pack) and moving my music mod to load after those plugins. So yeah i agree with you alasdairhurst, this is definitely a load order issue. Although, I wish I knew what the underlying issue was. I don't understand why a texture pack plugin, or any of the plugins Hubbin0 mentions (besides sounds of skyrim) would have a conflict with this mod. Seems that the current work around is to force your custom music plugin to load first, (after skyrim.esm and update.esm) using nmm.

 

But I think we must be doing something wrong in the creation of this mod for the load order to cause an issue like this. It's been quite some time since ive modded a tes game. So I'm going to do some more research on the creation kit and best practices for mod creation.

Edited February 13, 2012 by jimmycalhoun

[greenmachine8885]

Hi Jimmy. If the load order really is the issue here, and I am still not 100% that this is the root of our problems, then perhaps there is a way to change the FormID of our music. If we can edit that, change the 01 to something more desirable, perhaps we can tell Skyrim to look where we need it to.

 

Also, help me out with this one, I have something new. I just opened up my music mod, and looked at my imported music tracks again. When i right-click and go into edit, the Choose File path where we select where to find our custom tracks is blank. There should be a filepath directory there, but it apparently has not saved. Is this happening for anyone else? Because this is pretty clearly a problem for me, when Skyrim goes to load up my music, it has no idea where to look for the song on my hard drive.