Creating A Music Pack For Trepidation

Introduction

In this tutorial I would like to show you how you can add your own songs as a music pack into Trepidation. For many game modes, Trepidation will play a one of 7 music tracks randomly. You can easily replace these for your own gaming pleasure.

1. Preparing tracks

OK, you have a bunch of your favorite tracks to add to a music pack. You can add up to 7 tracks at maximum (at time of writing). Make sure that all of the tracks are at the same volume. If they differ too much it can be really annoying. Also the length of the tracks shouldn't exceed five minutes. It's not a problem if they do, but they won't come to an end before the map changes.

2. Format and converting

For the internal player we use OGG Vorbis audio format with a variable bit rate at quality setting 4. This indicates a nominal bit rate of 128kbps. Sample format should be 44100Hz, 16-Bit, Stereo. If you want to convert your original WAV files into OGG format, there is a helpful tool called oggdropXPd out there. You can find it in the Vorbis.com 3rd Party Software list.

3. Naming and sorting

OK, first step. Create the following folder structure somewhere and copy all your prepared OGG files into that folder.

C:\tunes\sound\music

'tunes' is just a place holder that we’ll be working in, you can name this whatever you want. Copy all of your OGG files into the music folder and name them mapmusic01.ogg, mapmusic02.ogg, and so on..

4. Making a PK3

Once you get your music converted and renamed in put into the correct folder, it's time to build the PK3. To-do so, just go into your working folder. In this case we called it ‘tunes’ and make a ZIP archive out of the ‘sound’ folder. Choose the highest compression level available and make sure that the sub-folder and all files are included correctly. Now rename it to 'mymusicpack.pk3'. Copy your music pack into the Trepidations base folder, where all the other PK3 files are located. Start the game and enjoy your music.

6. Other tips

Trepidation reads pk3’s in reverse alphanumeric order. So if you call your music pack. Acoolpack.pk3 it the pak1-ccdata.pk3 will override your music pack. Nake sure your pk3 filename starts with something higher in the alphabet than ‘p’.

The folder structure in your zip should look something like:

/sound/music/mapmusic01.ogg
/sound/music/mapmusic02.ogg
/sound/music/mapmusic03.ogg