can I insert my own music for one era only?

[lord of the mark]

I love most of the music in Civ4, but the John Adams (no relation to my avatar, AFAIK) music for the modern era gets tiresome. I'd rather substitute other stuff (Gershwin, Copeland, Glass, etc).

[Traianvs]

Fact! Late game music gets a bit tedious. Too little symphony for my taste.

How about putting your mp3 files in the respective age folders? (Ancient/renaissaince/medieval...). I haven't tried it, but maybe Civ simply plays the files in these folders so you can add your own if you like

[Cort Haus]

Late game music is dreadful - discordant trash. I just switch it off, being too lazy to sort out replacements, but I shall watch this space.

[Petek]

Originally posted by Traianvs
Fact! Late game music gets a bit tedious. Too little symphony for my taste.

How about putting your mp3 files in the respective age folders? (Ancient/renaissaince/medieval...). I haven't tried it, but maybe Civ simply plays the files in these folders so you can add your own if you like

I played around with this. It seems that the game looks for the specific mp3 file names that appear in the Soundtrack folders. For example, I moved the four files named

AncientSoundtrack1.mp3
AncientSoundtrack2.mp3
AncientSoundtrack3.mp3
AncientSoundtrack4.mp3

that appear in

C:\Program Files\Firaxis Games\Sid Meier's Civilization 4\Assets\Sounds\Soundtrack\Classical

elsewhere and then copied four other mp3 files (not from Civ4) to this folder. I then renamed these mp3 files to the names showed above. When I started a new game, the new mp3 files played.

Presumably this same technique would work for other eras.

Petek

[Adalbertus]

Originally posted by Cort Haus
Late game music is dreadful - discordant trash. I just switch it off, being too lazy to sort out replacements, but I shall watch this space.

That's what 20th century music is like. And ingame music is even not worst of all.

Older threads on that topic had no good solution, so I'm wondering if it really works that way.If it does, I'll use it sometime to adapt the music to my taste (which might be Renaissance and early baroque music all the time).

[snoopy369]

I believe the actual sound files are defined in an XML file somewhere... possibly the era xml. You could insert your own sound files there, rather than having to rename.

[eris]

I have a manual solution.

Create a folder full of Modern Era music that you like. When you reach the Modern Era, go to the options and select playing music from a custom folder. Make that folder the one full of Modern Era music.

It is an ugly and manual solution, but so far, it sounds like it would be simpler than hunting through the code.

I have the game set to play custom folder music, but in that folder, along with other things, I have the files from the Civilization soundtrack disc that came with the special edition. So I get to hear Civ music sometimes when I am playing Civ, or when playing random music on my computer or mp3 player. I might go looking for the in-game mp3's and put copies of them into my overall music folder.

[Addled Platypus]

hmmmmm

rammstein for modern era

[rah]

I already dream about playing civ after a long night of playing. I don't need my dreams to include the music. So I always play with the sound off. And also I play in a room with my wife not so far away and if you think the music is annoying when you're playing, according to my wife, it's considerably more annoying when you're not.

[eris]

What gets to my wife is not the music, but the fact that it keeps turning off or abruptly switching when I enter the city or diplomacy screens. Once she pointed it out, I couldn't blame her. So, in those cases where I am not alone in the room, I go for a Winamp session in the background. I just have to be careful what all I have in the background because my machine barely runs Civ as it is!

[Blaupanzer]

Originally posted by rah
Also I play in a room with my wife not so far away and if you think the music is annoying when you're playing, according to my wife, it's considerably more annoying when you're not.

My wife finds the combat sounds quite disturbing in all but the industrial/modern eras. Men grunting, the clash of steel, and the dying men crying out is way more than she wants to bear, even at fairly low volume. The screams when cities fall anywhere on the known planet is also disrupting for her as she watches her design shows. Apparently modern television inures us such that she finds the gunfire considerably less disruptive. Who knew we had trained our contemporaries and children to be "used to" the sound of guns?

[Supr49er]

My wife particularly hates the dying wolf sounds, and the horses sounds when getting stabbed with pikes. Men dying? Not so much.

[Blaupanzer]

Cruelty to horses = Oh, the poor horses, that must stop.
Cruelty to humans = So what else is new?

[rah]

I guess more of us play CIV with our wives near by than I would have thought.

[pedrojedi]

Originally posted by rah
I guess more of us play CIV with our wives near by than I would have thought.

Small apartments could make such relationships flourish indeed. And, of course, you gotta consider that it's a whole generation reaching late 20's early 30's - marrying time.

Some time in the future we will comment about how our nurses ( ) hate the dying wolf sound or the screaming people from yet another city taken.