Q:
Hello all!
Since I learned of the ability to have our own music play in-game using playlists, I’ve been tinkering with the feature and doing my best to get it to work. So far my attempts at doing so have met with mixed results and some success. My goal obviously, is to have complete success with them through the insight, tips and observations of other players or direct help through one of the community managers (If that’s what they’re called here at least!)
That said, let’s start with the basics. From the page of the wiki itself, ( http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Customized_soundtrack ) it says you must name your playlists as one of the following in order for the game to recognize it:
Ambient
Battle
BossBattle
City
MainMenu
NightTime
Underwater
And that the playlist format must be of one of these types:
.asx
.m3u
.pls
.wax
.wpl
And finally, that the music files themselves must be one of these:
.aiff
.flac
.mp3
.ogg
.wav
Following this criteria, one should be able to have the music work flawlessly, right? Well.. such is not always the case. For example, I follow these guidelines to a T and I am still having issues.
The issues I am currently encountering are that several of my playlists are outright not being recognized. The playlists I’ve yet to hear a peep from include the Ambient and Crafting playlists. After checking these two for any inconsistencies, I conclude that both are of the .m3u format and both use exclusively .mp3 files.
That being said, I am stumped as to why they aren’t being recognized. At first I surmised it was because my Ambient playlist has a ton of tracks on it, no less than 32. That however, shouldn’t be an issue as my Battle playlist has 57 songs to it!
So if file format, length and naming aren’t the issues here what could be causing my problem?
Here are a few observations that may or may not be related to my issue:
- Setting the ‘Music Interval’ option on the Sound Options tab all the way over to ‘Shorter’ will prevent several of my playlists from being recognized, most notably the NightTime and Battle playlists will be overrided by the game’s default music. I have no idea what is causing this, but setting the tab to the middle of the bar seems to have fixed this issue.
-At times during the transition between musics, there will be a jarring stuttering sound. Don’t know what causes this.
-Currently, in order to have the tracks you set be randomized, you have to insert a track of silence in order for the shuffle to get going. Otherwise, the first song on your playlist will ALWAYS be played first. While I’m not certain if this is intended or not, this leads to another observation..
-The MainMenu playlist seems to ignore this rule, as having a track of silence does nothing to keep the game from playing the tracks in order each time I log on. Again, no idea what could be causing this.
-BossBattle music doesn’t seem to have a trigger. I’ve fought world bosses, story mode bosses and dungeon bosses with the BossBattle soundtrack sitting in my music folder, and each time I’ve engaged these creatures, the normal battle music plays. Either my playlist here is not being recognized, or the BossBattle playlist is not being triggered for some reason.
So that’s that. If anyone is experiencing similar issues, or has found a work-around or permanent solution to my problem, please share your method! If anyone else has some strange observations about playlists, please share those as well. As always, if a CM has any input on the issues I am encountering, I would greatly appreciate their input as well. Let’s hammer out these bugs!
And in case anyone skimmed through my post and think that I have set up my files incorrectly:
Yes, I have the playlists named correctly.
Yes, I have the music files set as of the recognized formats.
Yes, the playlist are in one of the recognized formats.
Yes, the files are in the correct location.
Yes, the Music folder is placed correctly. (Otherwise my other playlists wouldn’t be working..)