sylvari tree

Before the offical forums turn read-only, Jim Boer popped in to say a few things about the in-game music player. For those that don’t know, the music in Guild Wars 2 that comes standard is not the only music you can listen to while in-game. In an ArenaNet blog post from last August, Jim Boer briefly explained that the in-game music could be changed. 

Finally, no matter how fantastic a game’s music is, when you hear the same music for the thousandth time, you start wanting to change things up a bit. Many players will simply turn the game music off and play their own collections. The problem is that an external music player has no context as to what’s going on in-game. Guild Wars 2 will offer a solution for this as well. We’re giving players the option of choosing external music playlists that the game’s audio engine will use as a replacement for the default in-game music. Players can choose different playlists for background ambience and battle music, for instance. Additionally, when appropriate, such as during cinematics, the game can revert back to in-game music temporarily to give the best possible cinematic experience, then resume the custom playlist when it’s done.

As fantastic as that sounds, it doesn’t really help us figure out how to actually substitute our in-game music with our own stuff. This became one of the hotter topics in their forums over the last couple of days and, once again Jim Boer comes to the rescue! Jim explains that to change the music all you have to do is navigate to “[Your Name]DocumentsGuild Wars 2Music” and place the playlist files here.

According to Jim, the supported playlist formats are .wpl, .m3u, .pls, .asx, and .wax. The supported audio types are the same as what FMOD supports, such as: .mp3, .ogg, .flac, .wav. aiff, and a bunch of old-school music formats, like .mid or .it files.

Lastly, he goes into detail on how to integrate your playlists into the game and have them transition well between different atmospheres.

There are eight specific playlists the game recognizes, and these are designated simply by the playlist’s file name. They are: Ambient, Battle, Underwater, City, Crafting, BossBattle, NightTime, and MainMenu. Hopefully these are somewhat self-explanatory in terms of when you might expect to hear them play.

So, for example, if you create a playlist called Ambient.m3u, anything in that playlist will be heard instead of the standard in-game ambient music (the general music you hear when running around in the world).

Since we can’t play right now, the only playlist that you can modify and actually notice a difference is the MainMenu playlist. This will change the music that plays at the login screen.

Happy editing!

For those who can login to the official forums, click here to view the thread in it’s entirety.