Soundtrack

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Introduction

Ever get tired of World of Warcraft's default music? Soundtrack lets you change the game's music to your liking. You can customize various in-game events using your own mp3s, using an easy to use interface.

Here's some example how users are using Soundtrack:

• Lord of the Rings music while in Elwynn Forrest
• Indiana Jones score while in Uldaman
• Neverending Story when flying on a hippogryph
• Shadow of the Colossus music when you encounter bosses
• Metal Gear Solid music when you're attacked in PvP
• Pink Panther or James Bond theme when stealthing
• Macho Man when your character starts dancing
• Spaghetti western music when on a mount
• Some people use their Final Fantasy scores to map to zones, battles, victories, death, level up, quest complete, etc.

Check out these videos of Soundtrack in use in the game: Video 1 Video 2 Video 3 Video 4 Video 5 Video 6 Video 7 Video 8

Installation

Soundtrack requires extra installation steps to gather your music information, so please follow these steps:

• Install the addon the usual way. Follow the instructions from the Install tab above.
• Install Python: Download and install Python.
• Verify the installation: You should have a C:\Program Files\World of Warcraft\Interface\Addons\Soundtrack folder on your machine if you installed correctly.
• Copy mp3s you want to use in-game to the Interface\AddOns\Soundtrack\Music folder. If you have a lot of mp3s, you should organize them into sub-folders.
• Generate your track library: One more thing before you start WoW. Run the Interface\AddOns\Soundtrack\GenerateMyLibrary.py file. This generates a file called MyTracks.lua that feeds your list of mp3s to the addon. You need to run GenerateMyLibrary.py whenever you add/remove mp3 files to the Music folder.

Features

• Play your own mp3s inside the game.
• Assign music to entire zones or specific sub zones. The default music still plays in zones that you do not assign music.
• Assign music when battling various levels of mobs, or specific named monsters.
• A plethora of events that you can assign music: Victory, Flight, Dance, Stealth, Swimming, Level Up, etc.
• Expose the full World of Warcraft score in your library to assign Blizzard's music to your own events.
• Can be used as a standard media player. You can create playlists and play them using mini floating playback controls.
• Simple interface to assign music to events. See all your tracks, sortable or filterable by track title, album or artist names.
• Custom events allows you to create your own events through lua scripting. Only for very advanced users with scripting knowledge.

Known Issues

• Cross-fading is broken between music tracks as of patch 2.2, so music starts and stops abruptly.
• Zone and battle music sometimes gets interrupted in instances or battlegrounds.
• The zone list can quickly get very large and hard to browse. I will eventually support expand/collapse in this list.
• Dance music does not stop when your character stops dancing. This is because there is currently no way to detect that you have stopped dancing, so the track stops when it reaches its end.

Feature Requests and Bug Reports

Please report any feature suggestions or bugs to my google code page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my playlist stop when I close the main window?
That's because the main window only lets you preview your playlists. To actually play them, you need to use the miniframe's playlist drop down and pick a playlist.

What types of music files are supported?
Only mp3s. Other formats are not supported by Blizzard such as wav, ogg, wma, m3u, m4a, m4p, aac, midi. MP3s with Japanese or other non-US characters in their names can cause problems, so I suggest renaming them.

There are a lot of programs to convert various music formats to mp3. I personally use iTunes for that. In iTunes, Edit->Preferences, select the Importing tab, and make sure you Import using: MP3 Encoder. Then you’ll be able to convert any tracks to an mp3 file.

Why do I need to copy my music to the Soundtrack/Music folder?
The only files that can be played by WoW are files placed under the World of Warcraft folder when the game is started. Advanced users might want to try junctions to add a virtual link between Soundtrack's music folder and your music folder.

How do I transfer my assignments to another machine?

1. Exit WoW on the target machine.
2. Copy your Interface/Addons/Soundtrack/Music folder to the target machine. If you only copy partial music files, it will still work, but the events that are missing tracks will be fixed automatically and you will lose the track assignments (since the tracks don’t exist).
3. Regenerate the library on the target machine. You do this the usual way, by running GenerateMyLibrary.py. You can also copy MyTracks.lua directly if you want to skip this step.
4. Copy the settings. All of Soundtrack settings are stored in World of Warcraft\WTF\Account\<UserName>\SavedVariables\Soundtrack.lua. So copy this file to the same location on the target machine.
5. Start WoW on the target machine!

Why do I need to install Python?
Because the Blizzard API with which I write the addon does not let me scan your music folder. This limitation is probably to prevent cheats or from addons to screw up your pc files. If this limitation is lifted, I will remove the script.So the only way to feed your list of tracks to the addon, is to generate that list outside of the game. I could have written a program in any language, but the reason I picked Python is because the same script works on both Mac and PCs, and you can read the script yourself, in case you are worried about the scripts security.

The script scans all your mp3s and saves the name, album, artist and track length to the MyTracks.lua file, which is loaded in the game.

- Updated UI code to 3.0 patch. - Note that I haven't had time yet to test the addon extensively with 3.0, but it does fix the major errors that prevented the UI frame from working properly.