How do you put your own music into the game?

[Emma]

I hate the sim-tunes (apart from the new wave station and I am getting sick of those) and I wondered how you can put your own music in the game? I am sure I have seen a tutorial somewhere, but can't, for the life of me, remember where.  TIA

[Hegelian]

You don't even need a tutorial. Just copy your preferred audio files (.wav or .mp3) into the various subfolders under the Music folder in My Downloads>EA Games.... and you're done--almost. Once in the game, open the audio controls and go through the tabs for the different music types. Unselect all the Maxis music, leaving your tracks selected.

Make your own custom radio stations and club soundtracks!

[Tina G]

Oh yea! Playing is much more pleasant having your own tunes in the game.  LOL, Hegelian, your music collection looks very similar to mine! 

[Zazazu]

Similar gripe...the Maxis music still hasn't gotten under my skin, but I hate having music in buy/build mode, since I build a lot of lots. Or just toggle in & out. I've tried unchecking every song in the options panel for buy/build mode tunes, but the dratted thing still plays stuff. Anyway to make this stick, or should I just find a "blank" mp3 and activate it while deactivating everything else?

I have noticed that only clicking one song does keep only that song playing. It just seems that the game doesn't want you in silence.

[Orikes]

Does it make me strange that I like some of the sim music so much, I've extracted it and put it on my iPod and even burned cds of sims music for my friends? And even bought some 'real' cds of songs I first heard on the sims pop station?

*cough*

[Scratch]

When your in the music controls, open the buy/build music, click play and then stop on each song and then "save"    by clicking on the audio icon again.... it's one of those things that works sometimes and doesn't make sense    .... i turned mine off but not sure how... it might only work in hood view too..

and it works on the CAS music

[Hegelian]

Does it make me strange that I like some of the sim music so much, I've extracted it and put it on my iPod and even burned cds of sims music for my friends?

Well, personally, I loathe all the music in the game, except for the classical and jazz (although the jazz is somewhat "lite"). I've been messing around in a "clean" game, and the first thing I did was turn the music off altogether.

LOL, Hegelian, your music collection looks very similar to mine! 

Cool! Or thanks, er . . . anyway, that's just the oldies folder. I made playlists for all the stations from the base game, Uni, and NL--I never did get around to doing the new ones from OFB.   

[Zazazu]

My current family plays the salsa channel. ALL THE TIME. It's the only cd they could find after the neighborhood went kablooey. The salsa channel is now the soundtrack to my dreams, and I find myself humming it at work. Between having to listen to that for three generations at this point and being thoroughly sick of the big families caused by no birth control and ACR, I'm thinking Medical and Music have got to be next. Gah.

[Lord Darcy]

Even if you turn off every track under buy/build mode, the game insists to play mp3s categorized under other sections like CAS or neighbourhood.

Carrigon posted some blank MP3s here.

I loathe every ingame music in TS2 too, except for classical. TS1 music was much better.

[Li'l Brudder]

I'm with Orikes.  Half the time I find myself whistling tunes from TS2.

[Soylent Sim]

If you have music you'd rather listen to while you sim, it should be a simple enough matter of loading that to the appropriate files and clicking off the ones that come with the game.  If you'd rather have silence, you can mute the music and other sound effects by X'ing a check box at the top of the audio options.

And count me in the Orkies club while we're at it.  Some Simlish tunes get under my skin, especially the teenybopper tracks that came with pets, but for the most part I think they're catchy and worth keeping around.

[Li'l Brudder]

Score one for the Orikes team!

We'll get those 50 souls for the ritual yet!

[Lord Darcy]

I want to play my own music in live mode, but I want silence in build/buy/CAS mode. Toggling mute button every time I switch modes is very annoying. The blank MP3s let me build and buy in silence without disabling stereos.

[witch]

I have no trouble turning off all music but I believe in some people's games this doesn't always work. I've never heard that anyone has worked out why some can and some can't.

There is another option for music, without having to store it in the sims 2 folders. You can have one music folder with all your mp3s and just point all your sims music to it. I suspect this would work even for people who can't turn off their music. I wrote a tutorial way back in the early days of MATY. I'll have a look and see if I can find it.

ETA: I'll copy and paste here, so people don't start replying to a two year old thread.

If you want to have one folder with all your music files, here's how to do it.
You need a programme named Junction Link Magic

Your file system should be NTFS (Right click on C:Drive in My Computer, choose Properties, near the top of the General Tab it should say 'File System NTFS').

Go to each sims music folder, eg C:\Documents and Settings\witch\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Music\build and delete the settings file so the folder is empty. (If you're concerned make a backup of your music folder first).
Empty each music folder, from build through to techno. These source folders, which will contain 'signposts' to your music, must be empty.

Make yourself a folder to contain the music you want to listen to. It can be on your main drive or another hard drive. It doesn't matter if the second hard drive is NTFS or FAT. I called my folder 'Current'.

You can put mp3's in this Current folder. I don't think you can have sub-folders. I put copies in here and delete when I'm sick of them.

Download Junction Link Magic.  Install and run the programme.

1. Start Junction link Magic. The programme will scan your hard drive(s) for any prior link points. When it's finished, click the Create button. You will see a dialogue box with 2 panels, similar to Windows Explorer.

2. On the left hand side, choose the sims music folder you wish to make a junction point in.
eg: C:\Documents and Settings\witch\My Documents\EA Games\The Sims 2\Music\hiphop

3. On the right hand side choose your music folder,
eg: C:\H_Stuff\Multimedia\Albums\Current

4. Create your link & say OK when asked if you are really really sure!

5. Repeat for each sims music folder - point each one towards your current music folder.

RTFM:
Junction links stay, you can't just delete the folder you made a link in. You MUST go into Junction Link Magic to delete any points you made if you no longer want them. You can run into problems if you don't. This is reallyreally important.
RTFM the RTFM. There is a good brief help included that explains how to use this programme and what the risks are.

My sims2 junction points:

[Emma]

Thankyou Heg, I didn't realise it was so easy Now watch me come back and say 'I can't do it!'

* Emma  presses 'thanks' button numerous times

I always find myself singing the 'Chocolate' song from the pop music station La, la, la la, la-la-laaaaaa

[Gamblor]

Is there a way to have the Sims play your music when they play the instruments in the game?

[Khan of Wyrms]

Is there a way to have the Sims play your music when they play the instruments in the game?

An interesting question...although I suspect it would involve some form of core-file hack, since the package files for that music are located in the main game directory, not 'My Documents'.  I have always wondered how the game handled the different tracks and the syncing of them for different instruments.  I wonder if they use a proprietary scheme or a common one, like midi.  Since I don't use SimPE I am not likely to find out.  I wonder if someone here is intrepid enough to crack one of those package files open and find out just what is in there.

[Hegelian]

I have always wondered how the game handled the different tracks and the syncing of them for different instruments.  I wonder if they use a proprietary scheme or a common one, like midi.

I don't have an actual answer, but I can tell you this (using the Uni objects.package as the example since this is when instruments were introduced):

In the core game files—

The audio for the stereo etc. are stored as "mp3 or xa Sound File (MP3)" (according to SimPE); these are in the Sounds folder in separate packages for the different audio sources you see in the in-game audio controls (jazz.package; neighborhood.package). They extract as MP3s and can be played like any other MP3, but the non-music files will not play, generating a "the extension does not match the file format" error. Since SimPE has a Replace feature, it is possible (at least in theory) to replace the Maxis music with your own, right in the objects.package. The one I'm looking at has the name of the song and the band at the end of the hex data, so I suppose you could edit the replacement file once you've inserted it into objects.package (unless the game reads the file's mp3 tag, making this unnecessary) so the correct name of the song appears in the game's audio controls . . . but if you try this and break your game, don't blame me. 

The non-music files are stored in a catch-all misc.package, a couple sfx packages, and six voice packages. Extracted voice files will not play.

The music for the playable instruments is stored in the misc.package, and these will play if you happen to stumble across one (they are not named by association in SimPE)—I happened to extract one of the drum tracks. These sound like actual recordings, not MIDI samples. The sound from the instruments is controlled by a band controller object in the objects.package file; presumably this is what Atavera cloned and modified for his playable-custom-instrument hack.

There are 4534 Audio Reference files, in an FWAV format. These extract as .simpe files—they appear be "instruction" or properties files, in hexadecimal with a text descriptor (i.e., flamingo_shrug_vox; di_nate_lightning4).

This is a guess, but I suspect the Audio Reference files act as the link between objects and their associated sounds. For example, when a sim plays an instrument, the soundtrack is different when she has no creativity points compared to when she has a lot of creativity. Something in the programming must tell the band controller which instrument track to play depending on the sim's skill level. This could be something buried in the BHAV files, but I'm guessing the Audio Reference files have something to do with it.

If you want to have one folder with all your music files, here's how to do it.
You need a programme named Junction Link Magic
[snip]

I don't doubt that this works, but it does seem unnecessarily complicated when you can just drop those mp3 files in the appropriate folders in My Documents. I would add though, that I once played through the audio files in one of my Sims "channels" with Media Player, and it somehow broke them for the game. I had to delete the copies in the My Documents game folder and move in new copies.   

[Emma]

First of all it wouldn't work and I realised that the file formats were wrong. Stupid Vista doesn't let you change file formats at all, so I had to re-upload all my CDs as MP3s. Works a charm though Heg. Ta very much

[witch]

I don't doubt that this works, but it does seem unnecessarily complicated when you can just drop those mp3 files in the appropriate folders in My Documents.

I wasn't concerned with finding appropriate music for the sims channels, I wanted to just listen to whatever were my favourites at the time. This left me with one folder I could move music in and out off as the mood suited, that is the advantage of having it all in one place.

[Quinctia]

I think I might try that, as I've been doing this for ages.  But a link like that just to my normal music folder will give me more variety without having a second copy of all my music on the harddrive.

[Hegelian]

First of all it wouldn't work and I realised that the file formats were wrong. Stupid Vista doesn't let you change file formats at all, so I had to re-upload all my CDs as MP3s. Works a charm though Heg. Ta very much

You're welcome!

However, I don't quite understand what you're saying here regarding "changing file formats." Were you trying to rename existing files with a new file-type extension (i.e., from .wav to .mp3)? This won't work because you're just changing the file name and you'll get an error that the file format doesn't match the file type.

Just copying the tracks from an audio CD to your hard drive as files won't work either. You won't get the entire track, and Windows doesn't recognize what is copied as a playable file. It can play .cda files from the CD, but not from the hard drive (if you look, you'll see that .cda files copied to the hard drive are only 1k in size). You need to convert CD audio into something a computer can play. The three obvious choices are WAV, MP3 (what you did), and AAC (for Apple products); WMA, Microsoft's answer to AAC, is superior to mp3 but less universal. It has the advantage of offering a lossless option.

In any event, the Sims 2 Readme.txt states that you can use WAV or MP3 so I don't know if any other format is accepted.

Recent versions of Media Player have audio "ripping" capabilities built in, but they're maybe not the best. I use the free Exact Audio Copy, which is more precise and offers more options regarding sound quality vs. compression, and you can use the MP3 encoder of your choice; I use LAME, the preferred encoder of audio traders everywhere.™  I've been using ver. 3.90.3, but I may switch to the current recommended version (3.97) even though some enthusiasts like the older version better. Since I only rip MP3s for use in TS2, it probably doesn't matter that much. You can find more than you'll ever want to know about encoding MP3s at HydrogenAudio.

As an aside, the term "rip" for audio or video extraction is an (incorrect) derivation of the process of preparing an image for display or printing. The software used for this is/was called a RIP (Rasterized Image Processor). Those sources that say it derives from the slang of Amiga users using an analogy to tearing pages from comic books to describe extracting images from games are just guessing.   

[Arina]

Do added mp3s have the same slowing-down effect on the game that custom content has? I ask because my downloads folder is down to 279mb, which I think is rather impressive, but I have 232mb of music in the various folders and... that seems like kind of a lot. (It used to be about 320 but I got rid of some duplicates.) If it doesn't slow it down I might just use witch's tutorial to give buy, build, cas and neighbourhood the same soundtrack. I've got enough actual disk space to have duplicates and triplicates of some of my mp3s, but if it will affect loading and performance I'll strip more out.

[jrd]

It is read and parsed at startup, so it will contribute some to the load delay. No idea how much though.

[Emma]

Well I have put about 50 songs, some of them up to 7 minutes long and I haven't noticed any difference in the loading time of the game.

Heg, the file format was WMA but they didn't work in the game at all. I used to be able to change the file format (and still do on my old computer) from WMA to .mp3 in XP to upload songs to my mp3 player. It works just fine, so it is slightly disconcerting to hear it shouldn't