costum soundtrack

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Peter03
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costum soundtrack

Post by Peter03 »

Hi , is there any way to have the custom soundtrack in games ?
i convert the music to wma files , but dont know where to put them since i have a E:\TDATA\fffe0000\music file
but no ST"DB file , can someone help me with this , i looked on the internet but found nothing
thanks !!!
Coldly-Indifferent
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Re: costum soundtrack

Post by Coldly-Indifferent »

I've never added anything to the Custom Soundtrack folder on E:\TDATA directly so I have no idea if there are any wrinkles needed to get them to work. Only thing I remember is something about the WMA music files needing to be WMA9.

But the obvious thing to do is surely to rip a retail music CD (assuming you have such a thing now) using the MS dash to create a Custom Soundtrack and see how that installs it to E:\TDATA.

You then use that as the template for installing your own WMA files.

Found some relevant post links:-

viewtopic.php?t=2107

https://old.reddit.com/r/originalxbox/c ... undtracks/
Last edited by Coldly-Indifferent on Wed Sep 22, 2021 1:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
Peter03
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Re: costum soundtrack

Post by Peter03 »

thank you , i'll try this !!!
Coldly-Indifferent
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Re: costum soundtrack

Post by Coldly-Indifferent »

The problem, as I just found out after a bit of experimenting, is that ST.DB file.

It seems to be in some unique format that the Xbox generates itself when you rip a CD to use as custom soundtrack. It is not regenerated if you delete/move it either. You can open it in a program like Libre Office but whilst you can see the Custom Soundtrack details its pretty messed up so editing it seems to be out of the question.

If you simply add additional WMA files to the TDATA folder it won't recognise them because they're not added to the ST.DB.

There are two solutions I'm thinking might work:-

1). Rip any retail music CD using the MS dash and then substitute in your WMAs via FTP/file manager ie. renaming each of them to use the same ID as the ripped CD Custom Soundtrack tracks. I don't know whether this does work but it might.

2). Create your own Audio CDs from the .WMA files (.WAV is actually recommended) then rip those on the Xbox/MS dash. A big problem with this is that a lot of Xbox disc drives do not like CD-R or CD-RW. Whether you can rip the custom soundtracks from a DVD-R (the only universally Xbox compatible disc type) I have no idea.

EDIT
Just finished playing around with the second method and it works very well.

I used tracks from a retail music CD I'd ripped on PC so they were all MP3. Using VLC I converted them all to WAV. Then ,using a CD burner with a specific "Audio CD" option: Burnaware, I burned them to a CD-RW (Verbatim).

Over to the Xbox, a v1.1 with a Samsung 605B DVD drive ie. one that likes CD disc media, I loaded the disc and voila, it reported as an audio CD and using the MS dash it played perfectly and so I copied the contents to a Custom SoundTrack.

Once done (quite slow as they're big WAV files), it played no problems and checking using the UnleashX file manager it had indeed been added to the E:\TDATA\ff....\music folder as ST 0001 and can be used in games that support the SoundTrack feature.

I suppose the thing to try now is seeing if they same source CD tracks can be burned to DVD-R and recognised as an Audio CD. Burnaware will not allow this if you're using the "Audio CD" option, its CD media only allowed.

I'm wondering if I converted the tracks to a XISO and burned that or just as Data whether the MS dash will read it as an Audio CD or a game. I suspect it won't but I'll give it a go.
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