How do you put your own music into the game?
Quinctia:
I think I might try that, as I've been doing this for ages. But a link like that just to my normal music folder will give me more variety without having a second copy of all my music on the harddrive.
Hegelian:
Quote from: Emma on 2007 June 06, 07:48:02
First of all it wouldn't work and I realised that the file formats were wrong. Stupid Vista doesn't let you change file formats at all, so I had to re-upload all my CDs as MP3s. Works a charm though Heg. Ta very much ;D
You're welcome!
However, I don't quite understand what you're saying here regarding "changing file formats." Were you trying to rename existing files with a new file-type extension (i.e., from .wav to .mp3)? This won't work because you're just changing the file name and you'll get an error that the file format doesn't match the file type.
Just copying the tracks from an audio CD to your hard drive as files won't work either. You won't get the entire track, and Windows doesn't recognize what is copied as a playable file. It can play .cda files from the CD, but not from the hard drive (if you look, you'll see that .cda files copied to the hard drive are only 1k in size). You need to convert CD audio into something a computer can play. The three obvious choices are WAV, MP3 (what you did), and AAC (for Apple products); WMA, Microsoft's answer to AAC, is superior to mp3 but less universal. It has the advantage of offering a lossless option.
In any event, the Sims 2 Readme.txt states that you can use WAV or MP3 so I don't know if any other format is accepted.
Recent versions of Media Player have audio "ripping" capabilities built in, but they're maybe not the best. I use the free Exact Audio Copy, which is more precise and offers more options regarding sound quality vs. compression, and you can use the MP3 encoder of your choice; I use LAME, the preferred encoder of audio traders everywhere.™ I've been using ver. 3.90.3, but I may switch to the current recommended version (3.97) even though some enthusiasts like the older version better. Since I only rip MP3s for use in TS2, it probably doesn't matter that much. You can find more than you'll ever want to know about encoding MP3s at HydrogenAudio.
As an aside, the term "rip" for audio or video extraction is an (incorrect) derivation of the process of preparing an image for display or printing. The software used for this is/was called a RIP (Rasterized Image Processor). Those sources that say it derives from the slang of Amiga users using an analogy to tearing pages from comic books to describe extracting images from games are just guessing. 8)
Arina:
Do added mp3s have the same slowing-down effect on the game that custom content has? I ask because my downloads folder is down to 279mb, which I think is rather impressive, but I have 232mb of music in the various folders and... that seems like kind of a lot. (It used to be about 320 but I got rid of some duplicates.) If it doesn't slow it down I might just use witch's tutorial to give buy, build, cas and neighbourhood the same soundtrack. I've got enough actual disk space to have duplicates and triplicates of some of my mp3s, but if it will affect loading and performance I'll strip more out.
jrd:
It is read and parsed at startup, so it will contribute some to the load delay. No idea how much though.
Emma:
Well I have put about 50 songs, some of them up to 7 minutes long and I haven't noticed any difference in the loading time of the game.
Heg, the file format was WMA but they didn't work in the game at all. I used to be able to change the file format (and still do on my old computer) from WMA to .mp3 in XP to upload songs to my mp3 player. It works just fine, so it is slightly disconcerting to hear it shouldn't :D
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