This mod will change your Rome - Total War immersion level once and for all! It adds about 300 carefully selected music tracks (~4 hours music total), spicing up each ingame culture. Features music from popular mods blended together along with tracks from various YouTube libraries and free artists.
Initially this should be supplement file for my project Lanjane's Barbarian Empires, but this auxiliary file was so big that I decided to release it as universal standalone mod.
This mod is compatible with vanilla game and with any modfoldered mod which do not have it's own music.
Installation:
Extract rome_total_music.7z to your Rome - Total War main folder, confirm overwrite files.
Launch set_music.bat before launch the game! Press button from 1 to 7 determining which culture you will play next game session, and bat file will do the rest for you!
ATTENTION: This mod will overwrite your Data/sounds/music.dat and Data/sounds/music.idx files but it has backups and, most importantly, it is designed in such way that no harm will be done to precious vanilla, you will still be able to use vanilla music anytime and you will be able to play vanilla without errors. See description!
Tip for cultures (vanilla settings):
BARBARIAN: Gauls, Germans, Britons, Scythia, Dacia, Spain
CARTHAGINIAN: Carthage, Numidia
GREEK: Greek Cities, Seleucid, Macedon, Thrace
EASTERN: Pontus, Parthia, Armenia
EGYPTIAN: Egypt
ROMAN: roman families, Senate and free people (rebels)
Once the mod installs on your system, you'll have folders music_options and music_backup inside your data folder, as well as .bat file set_music.bat.
Rome - Total War is a very old game, and because of that it can't handle RAM effectively, no matter how much RAM you have on your system. Once game's memory utilization reaches a threshold which is about ~1.4Gb RAM, it becomes very unstable and starts crashing randomly, post-battle or even in battle. That's why this mod was designed; because music which is defined in game text files, goes directly to RAM when game starts. To avoid that and to free a fair amount of RAM, different music set was used for each culture, so if you play for example greek campaign, other cultures are commented out because you don't need these files and you can save RAM if you comment out these tracks in game file.
So when you launch the bat file, you'll have to choose a number from 1 to 7, each number from 1 to 6 representing a culture, and 7 is swapping back to vanilla. Notice that you don't have to use old music.idx and music.dat. Modded files already include both new and vanilla tracks, and the only file which is operated on the mod level is text file descr_sounds_music.txt which assignes music tracks to each culture.
music_options - folder containing music swapper files. Do not delete or move that folder or mod will stop working.
music_backup - contains full backup of modded files, you can simply revert to unmodded state anytime.
Uninstallation:
Copy content from music_backup to your Rome - Total War folder, confirm overwrite.
Credits for some of the used materials can be found under spoiler
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Music is carefully organized by culture compatibility, for example name Campaign_20_BGR means that the track is campaign one, and compatible with Barbarian, Greek and Roman cultures. Et cetera. You can add your own music if you will create folder music inside data/sounds, put your files there and point the descr_sounds_music.txt to these files. Just pay attention that you must edit only files which are located in music_options folders, except the vanilla one!
