Introduction:
ArenaNet has offered the ability for people to replace Guild Wars 2 ingame music with different custom playlists that will play at certain locations / situations. This guide will explain how to do this.
Getting Started:
What you need is any media program that can create and save music playlists. The following playlist formats are supported: .wpl, .m3u, .pls, .asx, and .wax
For Windows users Windows Media Player is the easiest option.
Supported audio files are: everything FMOD supports by default, which includes .mp3, .ogg, .flac, .wav. aiff, and a bunch of old-school music formats, like .mid or .it files
Setting Up The Playlists:
Drag the song(s) you want for your playlist inside the playlist menu, and go to File, then select Save Now Playing list as… and locate your Guild Wars 2 music folder, which should be under: C:\Users\Your Name\My Documents\Guild Wars 2\Music
These are the recognised playlists: Ambient, Battle, Underwater, City, Crafting, BossBattle, NightTime, and MainMenu – Saving under any other names will not play the list ingame.
A how-to-do video on setting up your playlists (excuse my English… not my main language…):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cQFoMQTnns&hd=1
How They Work:
Custom playlists work the way you’d think they’ll work. Whenever you’re out in the field during daytime you’ll have your Ambient playlist playing. During battle with more than 3 enemies at a time, the game will activate the Battle playlist. In the huge instanced cities, your City playlists will be playing.
Songs don’t seem to get randomised very well. A playlist will always start off with the first song on the list. What I’ve noticed from the little testing that I did with the MainMenu playlist is that after the first song it does seem to randomise the songs. So a possible solution might be add one very short silent sound file as your first song on the list.
Tip: Using a short audio file as the first song does function as a playlist randomiser. Randomising works for all playlists, except MainMenu and BossBattle.
A Fix To Quiet Playlists
In the previous custom music thread there were people having trouble with getting it to work. The most common problem was setting up the playlists as described in my video, but not hearing any music ingame.
Luckily I found out what caused this, and how to fix this.
This is caused by having your Windows Media Player writing shortcuts for the file location in the playlist. Then moving the playlist to another drive, the game will not be able to find the location of the audio file from the written shortcut in the playlist.
The easy way to fix this is to save your playlist on a different drive than the one you saved it on previously, and then copy/paste that playlist into your Guild Wars 2\Music folder.
If you don’t have a second drive to save your playlists on, you can try this. Open your playlist file in Notepad. You’ll see the file location for each song in the list is noted as a shortcut. Manually edit the noted location so it shows the full location. Example of playlist with full locations for each song:
http://i80.photobucket.com/albums/j165/Milennin/ScreenShot218.png
(edited by Milennin.4825)
, etc.) in front of each track.
