Guild Wars 2

I haven’t been able to log in for about a month (old PC fried, just got new one).

I’m using my old hard drive, however, but I’m noticing my customized soundtrack is no longer playing. Is this the case for anyone else?

None of it is playing. Not main menu, not ambient, battle, etc…

I cant get my custom playlist playing since the Tequatl Rising patch, thats 2 weeks ago. So you are definetly not alone with this. The game plays its own original soundtrack though.

I had problems with just getting it working in the first place (copying the songs right into the music folder of GW2 as well as the playlist files pointing at them) and now it seems whatever i do or redo, its not working.

I think I was one of the few that had it working pretty flawlessly and understood it very well – I added a number of things on the Wiki entry about it, including clarity with regards to City playlists, which confuses a lot of people.

Anyway, I hope they fix it. I love GW2’s music and use it sometimes but I do set up in-game playlists to sort of go along with the “feel” of my characters – adds to my immersion in the game.

Have you tried throwing the custom soundtracks in the new location for the local.dat file?

For me it was:
C:\Users\MY USER NAME\AppData\Roaming\Guild Wars 2

Tried it, didnt work. My custom lists are as good as non-existant to the game.

Any word on this? Deliberate/not deliberate? Fix on the way? Gone for good?

Im entertaining the idea of submitting a support ticket on this if the oct.15. patch doesnt do anything with it. Might be a rare issue for only a few individuals, hopefully fixed easily if looked at by professional support staff.

That’s not a bad idea. I think I’ll do the same. I’m hoping it does fix it. ATM I’m just manually running my custom playlists from the GW2 folder as appropriate, but it can get kind of inconvenient, lol.

I’ll try this out as I understand it. That kind of makes sense with how some of the other audio stuff works – for example, I don’t know if you guys were aware of this, but “compressed” music files do not play in GW2. I discovered this when I noticed (while I was still using XP) it wouldn’t play music files whose names were in blue (IE, compressed). Copying said files and simply re-pasting them resolved the issue.

Anyway, gonna try this save thing out.

The bug is still occurring. The above fix didn’t have any effect. Going to try using a different format and see if that does anything.

Nada.

.wpl, .m3u and .asx conversions (was originally using .wpl) didn’t work. And yes, every time I save I am straight saving it to guild wars 2/music without doing any copying/moving.

I tried saving the list in Windows Media Player with a “Save As” command right into the Misc folder of the game (since i have no idea how to point out a new directory for the original creation of playlists in either winamp or WMP, but i dont assume a save as option would be that far from that), still not working for me either.

Thanks for looking into this Keenan, been bugging me for a while now.

I gave it a try myself, just for the main menu (want to keep the rest of the game’s music the way it is for now). I created an M3U playlist of three tracks called MainMenu and placed it in a “Music” folder in the Guild Wars 2 map located in AppData. Tested it, it didn’t work.
Then I put it in the map where you originally had to put custom music, in Documents/Guild Wars 2/Music.

Tested it again, and it worked!

So, the functionality isn’t completely broken, and the way I have it now, there’s no issues. Hope this helps locate the issue.

Chellae, you are my hero.

So i went ahead and looked at my Documents folder, looking for that Guild Wars 2 folder i never knew about. There i found my screenshots i took and didnt know where they disappeared to just a few days ago. There was no Music folder, but i created one and put my Battle playlist there (Save As function, not copy or move).

And voila, it really worked. I got my custom tracks back.

Sometime the source directory must have changed, or it is the fact that i have the game on a different drive than my system, and my system was reinstalled not long ago. The game worked flawlessly after that (not counting the custom playlist issue) so i never thought it might be connected.

Well hell! I started playing around with directories the other day, I TOTALLY forgot to update this, but yeah. Kudos, Chellae! Though I’d found it, I forgot to post. I started screwing around with stuff and basically putting MainMenu.wpl into every directory that seemed relevant. First in the root GW2 file directory, then in music (as per usual). Even put one in Music/Music just to be absolutely sure. Eventually it occurred to me that since getting my new PC, the screenshot directory changed, so I put it in the folder with the screenshots and bam.

Hopefully if anyone else is having issues, they’ll find this thread. I’ll add an entry to the wiki for clarification.

Umm is there a solution for mac though? I tried everything like Ezekiel did and also exporting my playlist again directly to the music folder but it still won’t work.

I seem to get hit and miss results. The default music for LA/Ambient seems to play a lot randomly, even though it is nowhere in my playlist. I know during the festival that the Halloween music may over right my custom playlist, but this was happening before that.

I use the GW1 sound tracks with a bunch of sorting into categories, so it isn’t always immediately apparent it is working incorrectly unless I toss a random pop song into the playlist.

LyritEmbrium.2917:

Umm is there a solution for mac though? I tried everything like Ezekiel did and also exporting my playlist again directly to the music folder but it still won’t work.

All I can offer is: Find out where your screenshots are stored, and put the playlists in the same folder as that folder as in.

Example if your screenshots are stored in BDSMdungeon/GW2/Screenshots you will put your playlists in BDSMdungeon/GW2/ and not within the screenshot directory. Should work then, but I honestly can’t speak for mac.

Saucermote.9140:

I seem to get hit and miss results. The default music for LA/Ambient seems to play a lot randomly, even though it is nowhere in my playlist. I know during the festival that the Halloween music may over right my custom playlist, but this was happening before that.

I use the GW1 sound tracks with a bunch of sorting into categories, so it isn’t always immediately apparent it is working incorrectly unless I toss a random pop song into the playlist.

I’ve added some details (granted this was awhile ago) about some playlist functionality to the GW2 wiki, but I’ll sum it up a bit:

Cities do not always use your city playlist. IT depends on the city. DR for example, will use “City” almost everywhere. Lion’s Arch uses Ambient almost everywhere, probably because it feels kind of outdoorsy and adventurey. Hoelbrak is mostly Ambient, excepting the trader area and maybe some others (I don’t spent much time in Hoelbrak). The grove I think is literally Ambient everywhere. Black Citadel in my experience is about half City, half Ambient.

If you are in a non-city zone, and in an open zone (example: Queensdale, Cursed Shore), it will play your Ambient list, unless it’s nighttime, in which case it will play your NightTime list. If you don’t have a NightTime list, it will continue to play ambient.

Some cut scenes and areas (most of these areas are in dungeons or PS instances) will have specific soundtracks they always play regardless of your playlists. Citadel of Flame, for example, always plays that default drum song, only switching to Battle when in combat, and BossBattle for the final bosses (or at least the P1 boss, haven’t really paid attention to music consistency with the other bosses as those paths require more focus).

Another example, the final personal story instance always plays Fear Not This Night. Unless you have your music off altogether of course.

(even then, sometimes a song will slip through)

But yeah, if you’re one of those classical COF farmers (no insult, just noting that many people do a lot of COF farming hehe), you will be among a crowd of people that notices your ambient list never works while in the dungeon.

I’ll clarify a bit too, I have m3u soundtracks for every category listed on the wiki, and I still hear the the default GW2 a good amount of time, especially in LA. None of the GW2 music has been added to my playlists. So LA on my end is playing something that isn’t city, ambient, or nighttime play lists.

I also can’t seem to figure out what makes it play the default music as opposed to the festival music in LA, it seems to randomly pick one of them.

Maybe I have something set wrong, but it is something that has persisted across different playlist formats.

LA is one of the areas that currently will not play your custom playlists, because it is currently using Halloween songs instead. When Halloween is gone, it should resume playing your custom lists (and because it’s LA, it should use Ambient/NightTime, mostly, and not City.)

Edited to note – usually “seasonal” events with music recorded specifically for them will override your custom music. See: Halloween and Wintersday. This usually includes their related zones, as well. See: Wintersday jumping puzzle zone, of which I forgot the name.

This doesn’t ALWAYS happen, though. For example. Zephyr Sanctum had music unique to it, but it would play Ambient instead if you had that playlist in your music folder. But in the past, Halloween and Wintersday have played over custom lists.

It makes sense, I just wish there was an official document (not the user edited wiki) that explained how it was supposed to work, so we’d have a consistent point of comparison.

My problem on this topic would be the large spaces between playing the custom music tracks from the .M3U playlist, and the fact some .mp3 became mutch more quiet in the game.

for macs the screenshots save on the desktop =/

Just clearing this up for whoever else Google’s this issue after having problems. If there is no Music folder in C:\Documents\Guild Wars 2 – You can create your own and copy your Playlists into there. However, copying the playlist files across from the drive they were created on creates problems. If you open a playlist file with Notepad, you’ll see the “media src” starts with "..\ – Change this to the drive letter your music folder is on, lets say D. Lets also say that the music folder on this drive is called music.

Change the “..\” at the start to D:\Music\Rest of file link continues here as normal. It should work fine then!