Mod (etc.) for looping background music?

[Lochlann]

Hey all, quick question here. How can I change the looping procedure for background music, in order to remove the long stretches of silence between tracks? I prefer my wanderings to be accompanied by a dramatic score , even a repetitive one, and I dislike the long stretches of silence. In BG1, a quick-save would re-initiate the background music, but that isn't the case in SoA/ToB. (And in any case the individual tracks were much longer in BG1.)

 

I'm guessing that something much simpler than a mod would do the trick, some .ini addition or whatever, but I can't seem to turn anything up. Any advice? Thanks!

[Mike1072]

This could be because some of the .mus files have built-in "play 1 minute of silence" sections. I'd advise you to check out this and this, then use Near Infinity to open one of the .mus files for an area, like MX1200.MUS for Windspear Hills. You'll see that the minute-long blank sound file SPC1 is played about 5 times as often as the musical sound file MX1200A, which is only 30 seconds long.

 

You should be able to experiment with removing some of the SPC1s from these .mus files to see if that will reduce the amount of time when there's no background music playing. Let me know how it goes.

[devSin]

Yeah, you basically want to turn

MX1234
6
SPC1
A
SPC1
SPC1
SPC1
SPC1

into

MX1234
1
A   MX1234 A

for all the MX1234 area music playlists. Note that not all areas even have music, so you'll still be confronted with silence fairly regularly; there's no mod I know of to add music to every single area (though it would be trivial to do).

[Lochlann]

Okay, cool, thanks for the advice. I recall having this complaint during my first playthrough of the game, years ago, and I recall there being something simpler than what you've suggested. Something like adding a simple line to the .ini, or something.

 

Meh, no matter. I'll give this a whirl. Though I confess that I'm not as bothered by the lack of continuous music as I thought I would be! We'll see how it goes.

 

Thanks again!