Need help figuring out why my music addition isn't working at all

[El Monstero29]

I decided to overhaul Divide and Conquer's music for myself. My goal is to give all or most factions their own unique soundtrack. I've largely succeeded in this goal. I started out this process by simply doing one faction at a time, then testing it in game to ensure it was working correctly. That method was working wonderfully...so of course, being the genius that I am, I stopped doing that when I did the last batch of songs for several factions all at once.

Needless to say, I screwed up something somewhere somehow. When I rebuilt the music file for what I assumed would be the last time the game crashed before getting to the main menu, which it usually does not do. When I rebuilt the music.dat/effects.dat pack in all my other test runs I was able to get to the main menu but unable to start a new campaign without closing and restarting the game. This time however it crashed before getting to the main menu and when I reopen the game after that no music plays anywhere and even some of the sound effects(which I didn't even touch) aren't working. This is very discouraging for me as I thought I was in the home stretch of what has proven to be the most frustrating bit of Med 2 modding I have ever done. I don't even begin to know how to go about fixing this problem without simply starting over from scratch.

My hope is that somebody here is willing to download my borked files which I will link below and point out where I messed up. I'm linking the unpacked files so that someone else can do the rebuilding process for themselves and see what happens.

Somethings I already checked for myself:

1. All the music files are in mp3 format.

2. As far as I can tell, my text file entries are all correct(though this is most likely where I screwed up)

3. I searched to see if I was hitting some kind of hard coded limit in terms of music.dat file size. But as far as I can tell there is no limit. My music file is 1.70gbs when unpacked.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm hoping one of you wizards can work a miracle for me here

http://www.mediafire.com/file/hwn7md...en%20music.rar

[selv]

I am downloading to look as I did musics changes recently. Question in the meantime, did you follow this tutorial? It worked for me:
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...-Music-To-M2TW

I also had to delete event.dat and idx to let the game rebuild them with the music, as indicated.

[El Monstero29]

Yep, that's the guide I followed. And yeah I deleted event.dat and the idx files each time I rebuilt the music.

[selv]

Hm, well I can't download DAC to try, not much spared hard drive space left. I looked quickly and don't see something wrong at first glance so all I can suggest would be to check:
1, your regions internal names in descr_sound_music_types, but the system log should tell if there is something mispelled.
2, that you didn't forget a music listed in descr_sound_music but not in the music folder
3, what you did in the descr_sound, not directly related to music add/changes

Else, they are worst things to start from scratch, but it's always a pain. only you can know everything you did and when, that's always the problem with these things.

[El Monstero29]

Alright, thanks for looking at my files for me at least. I'll double check everything again. If I can't find the culprit then I'll just start over, it's not the end of the world like you said.

Thank you, Selv.

[El Monstero29]

I seem to have found the culprit(s) but I don't even begin to understand WHY they are causing my music to stop playing. Certain songs in my collection seem to cause everything to break for no explicable reason. For example, rohan_stratmap_06 just randomly causes all music to cease to play. When I remove its text entry from descr_sounds_music then everything goes back to working just fine. I don't even need to remove this song from the music.dat file. It's the text entry that is causing this. This song in particular has no obvious flaw to it. It's in mp3 format, it plays just fine on my computer by itself. It's named correctly...

I just don't get it. This isn't the only song doing this. There are others that are exactly the same. It just seems so random and arbitrary. Has anyone ever encountered anything like this before? It seems to me that Med 2's music system is held together by nothing more than duct tape and silly string...

[El Monstero29]

Update, I've found the root cause of the problem I was having! It turns out there is indeed a hard coded limit to the size of Music.dat. Exceeding 1.5gbs with this file will break 80% of Med 2's audio.

[Ngugi]

A useful problem then

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Perhaps you could post this discovery as a thread in the tutorial section, as a useful instruction/advice?
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forum...nd-Other-Media

[Araval]

Just for confirmation, are you sure it's the size of Music.dat that matters? I've heard from Gallus that the number of tracks could be an issue - he thought it was about 100 tracks.

Also, what you said here:

For example, rohan_stratmap_06 just randomly causes all music to cease to play. When I remove its text entry from descr_sounds_music then everything goes back to working just fine. I don't even need to remove this song from the music.dat file. It's the text entry that is causing this.

seems to me contradicts with this:

Update, I've found the root cause of the problem I was having! It turns out there is indeed a hard coded limit to the size of Music.dat. Exceeding 1.5gbs with this file will break 80% of Med 2's audio.

What you could do, no matter what's causing this, would be a switcher for your mod such as this one: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...end-of-page-66
Depending on the faction you choose to play, it replaces the music-related files to match this faction.

[El Monstero29]

Perhaps you could post this discovery as a thread in the tutorial section, as a useful instruction/advice?
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forum...nd-Other-Media

I'm considering making a new up to date and definitive guide on modding Med 2's music. Currently, anyone looking into modding faction specific playlists needs to refer to 2 different guides and even then you also need to scroll through comments to find ALL the info out there. Do you guys think that is a worthwhile thing to do? Or is it even really relevant at this point?

Just for confirmation, are you sure it's the size of Music.dat that matters? I've heard from Gallus that the number of tracks could be an issue - he thought it was about 100 tracks.

Also, what you said here:

seems to me contradicts with this:




What you could do, no matter what's causing this, would be a switcher for your mod such as this one: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...end-of-page-66
Depending on the faction you choose to play, it replaces the music-related files to match this faction.

I did contradict myself didn't I? The first statement was made before I had any real clue what was actually happening, but part of it does still remain true. Removing the text entries does allow you to bypass the 1.5gb limit, however, this means that you won't ever hear those songs that you remove the entries for. I still don't fully understand exactly what's happening there, but I did extensive tests and found that anytime Music.dat went even a single byte over 1.5gb, AND all the text entries were set properly in descr_sounds_music, the audio would break.

I'm looking at the switcher you linked and, to be honest, that intimidates the crap out of me! I feel like if editing the music was this frustrating for me then trying to set up what almost seems like a hack of the game would just be too much for my meager modding skills!

EDIT: I also forgot to address the song number limit: you can definitely have more than 100! I ended up with 344 songs which add up to 1.41gbs in mp3 format. When the game creates Music.dat out of them their size inexplicably grows to 1.5gbs...So you can't even actually have 1.5gbs of songs, the ACTUAL, legit, for real limit is 1.41gbs or so.

[Ngugi]

I'm considering making a new up to date and definitive guide on modding Med 2's music. Currently, anyone looking into modding faction specific playlists needs to refer to 2 different guides and even then you also need to scroll through comments to find ALL the info out there. Do you guys think that is a worthwhile thing to do? Or is it even really relevant at this point?

If any kind of sound modding is, it's definitivly music, as its something most proven interested in and attracts many beginners to modding to test out.

[El Monstero29]

Very well! I shall work on that over the weekend. Hopefully I can help make the process of learning how to do this stuff a lot less painful and convoluted than it is now.

[Araval]

Removing the text entries does allow you to bypass the 1.5gb limit, however, this means that you won't ever hear those songs that you remove the entries for.

It's interesting information, again not the same that I've heard:

if the .dat files are present the game won't check if they match the mp3 files and the information in descr_sounds_music.

I'm looking at the switcher you linked and, to be honest, that intimidates the crap out of me! I feel like if editing the music was this frustrating for me then trying to set up what almost seems like a hack of the game would just be too much for my meager modding skills!

This would also open up the possibility to have faction specific battle music.

EDIT: I also forgot to address the song number limit: you can definitely have more than 100! I ended up with 344 songs which add up to 1.41gbs in mp3 format. When the game creates Music.dat out of them their size inexplicably grows to 1.5gbs...So you can't even actually have 1.5gbs of songs, the ACTUAL, legit, for real limit is 1.41gbs or so.

Thank you for confirming! So I think why Gallus could add less was because he encoded the mp3 files in higher quality (bitrate) taking more data. So you can use more lower quality music than higher quality.
The quality wouldn't also be a problem with the swicher^^


Godspeed with the tutorial!