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Music Modding Tutorial

By Nali

A step-by-step guide on how to replace the game's music with your own custom tracks.

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Created by

Nali
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Category: Modding or Configuration

Languages: English

Posted

Updated

9 Oct, 2018 @ 6:20pm

23 Oct, 2018 @ 9:43pm

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Guide Index

Overview

Intro

Required Tools

Before You Begin

Formatting Your Music

Loops and Metadata

Putting It Together

That's All, Folks

Appendix: File Mappings

Appendix: Tips and Tricks

But I Want To Mod the Cast Theme

Version History

Comments

Intro

Do you like Mega Man 11, but wish there was a chiptune music option?

Do you dig the instrumental tracks, but wish they swapped out more than just the robot masters?

Or do you just want to go nuts and play the game to your favorite tunes, no matter what they are?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, you're in the right place.

Required Tools

To follow this guide, you will need the following software:

Audacity: https://www.audacityteam.org/

That’s it! No archive unpacking or decryption here.

Before You Begin

Mega Man 11’s music files are all located within the following folder:

..\steamapps\common\Mega Man 11\nativeDX11x64\sound\

I recommend backing it up before making changes for easy recovery of specific files later on.

If you don’t know where to find \steamapps\, right click Mega Man 11 in your games list, then click Properties->Local Files->Browse Local Files to get to its directory.

Formatting Your Music

The engine expects music files to be in a specific format with specific metadata, and will refuse to play anything that fails to meet its criteria. With that in mind, let’s get to it.

First, open your custom track in Audacity:

Every file needs to be configured in the following ways:

It must be a stereo track. Most files should be stereo by default, but if you’ve got a mono track, you’ll need to duplicate it (Edit->Duplicate), then click the track’s name and select Make Stereo Track. The engine plays mono files back at super speed, and we don’t want that.
Project Rate must be 48000Hz. The engine assumes all music is sampled at that rate and plays it back accordingly, so feeding it a 44100Hz file gets you a sped up chipmunk version of the track. Leave the track’s sample rate alone, however; Project Rate is the one that matters.
Certain metadata tags need to be added and set or the file won’t play at all. We’ll get back to this one.

You’re also going to want to set Audacity’s UI to display selections by sample count instead of time:

The settings should look like this before you move on:

Select and delete any leading silence next. MM11’s original tracks don’t have any*, and the game is timed around them playing immediately. This is also a good time to make adjustments to the volume level if you need to (Effects->Normalize for balancing volume across multiple tracks, or Amplify for manual adjustments).

*Exceptions: bgm_ev_01 has about 1.2 seconds of silence, and bgm_boss_04 about 1.5.

Loops and Metadata

If you just want to loop the entire file, select the whole track and skip ahead a bit. If you don’t want the file to loop at all, you can also skip ahead.

More commonly though, you’ll need to select a portion of the track and spend some time fine-tuning its boundaries until you find sample numbers where it loops cleanly. Shift-click the timeline above the track inside the boundaries of the selection to play it in a loop on the fly.

When you’re satisfied with your selection, make a note of the start and end points.

Now it’s time to set the metadata. Open it up via Edit->Metadata…:

A small window will appear. Hit the Clear button to wipe out anything that’s already in the tags, then hit the Add button twice to give yourself a couple more rows to work with. In the Tag column, enter the following labels:

LoopStart
LoopEnd
Ver

Capitalization matters. The engine expects those precise tags and has no tolerance for errors. In the Value column, LoopStart and LoopEnd take the corresponding sample numbers of your selection, or -1 if you don't want the file to loop. Ver should always be 0002.

Click OK when you’re done.

Putting It Together

Nearly finished now. Go to File->Export->Export as OGG.

Save it somewhere and wait a few seconds for the export to render out. You can change the quality setting if you want, but the engine doesn’t care. The default is 5, which corresponds to a target bitrate of 160kbps, which is what MM11’s music uses anyway.

At this point, you need to know the filename and path of the track you’re replacing. Refer to the list below if you aren’t sure. Rename the file you exported to the exact name of the file you want to replace, extension included. Windows hides extensions by default, but you can reveal them from within File Explorer:

Copy your replacement file over the original and you’re done! And I do mean copy, you don’t want to have to do all this again in the event that the game updates and Steam overwrites all your hard work.

That's All, Folks

If you did everything right, your track will now play in-game like it was always meant to be there.

Have fun!

(Do I want to play the whole game using Super Bomberman R's soundtrack? Heck yeah I do.)

Appendix: File Mappings

\Mega Man 11\nativeDX11x64\sound\ \dlc\ (if you own it) \001\wave\bgm_st001_dl.sngw — Block Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \002\wave\bgm_st002_dl.sngw — Acid Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \003\wave\bgm_st003_dl.sngw — Impact Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \004\wave\bgm_st004_dl.sngw — Bounce Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \005\wave\bgm_st005_dl.sngw — Fuse Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \006\wave\bgm_st006_dl.sngw — Tundra Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \007\wave\bgm_st007_dl.sngw — Torch Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \008\wave\bgm_st008_dl.sngw — Blast Man Stage (instrumental ver.) \eng\stream\ \demo\ — English cutscene VO \gallery\ — English gallery boss VO \shop\ — English shop VO \stream\ \boss_select\wav\ bgm_boss_start.sngw — Boss intro jingle (does not loop) bgm_select_01.sngw — Stage Select bgm_select_02.sngw — Stage Select (Wily Stages) bgm_select_jingle.sngw — Gear Fortress Appears (does not loop) bgm_shop.sngw — Shop theme \demo\ — Japanese cutscene VO, cutscene tracks There are lots of copies and variants of the cutscene tracks scattered around, but they generally break down as follows: bgm_ev_01.sngw — Light and Wily's memories theme bgm_ev_02.sngw — Cheerful theme bgm_ev_03.sngw — Wily’s appearance theme bgm_ev_04.sngw — Heroic theme bgm_ev_05_01.sngw — Cast (neither of the copies here are used in-game) (refer to the dedicated section for more details) bgm_ev_05_02.sngw — Staff Roll (unused; replace the copy in \stage\) \gallery\ — Japanese gallery boss VO \menu\ \wav\ bgm_game_over.sngw — Game Over jingle (does not loop) bgm_menu.sngw — Menu theme bgm_result.sngw — Challenge Result theme \shop\ — Japanese shop VO \stage\ \001\wave\bgm_st001.sngw — Block Man Stage \002\wave\bgm_st002.sngw — Acid Man Stage \003\wave\bgm_st003.sngw — Impact Man Stage \004\wave\bgm_st004.sngw — Bounce Man Stage \005\wave\bgm_st005.sngw — Fuse Man Stage \006\wave\bgm_st006.sngw — Tundra Man Stage \007\wave\bgm_st007.sngw — Torch Man Stage \008\wave\bgm_st008.sngw — Blast Man Stage \100\wave\bgm_st100.sngw — Wily Stage \101\ — no music \102\ — no music \103\ — no music \207\wave\bgm_ev_05_02.sngw — Staff Roll \300\ — no music \400\wave\bgm_st400.sngw — Challenges: Dr. Light’s Trial \401\wave\bgm_st401.sngw — Challenges: Boyorn Bounce \402\wave\bgm_st402.sngw — Challenges: Tank Oven Panic \403\wave\bgm_st403.sngw — Challenges: One Hit Wonders \share\wave\ bgm_boss.sngw — Robot Master battle bgm_boss_02.sngw — Wily Stage boss battle bgm_boss_03.sngw — Wily Machine battle bgm_boss_04.sngw — Wily transition jingle (does not loop) bgm_boss_05.sngw — Wily Capsule battle bgm_weaponget.sngw — Weapon Get theme bgm_win.sngw — Boss defeated jingle (does not loop) \weapon_get\ — no music \title\wave\bgm_title.sngw — Title theme

Appendix: Tips and Tricks

Seamless Wily Capsule

The Wily Capsule battle uses two different tracks, bgm_boss_04 and 05. 04 is played when the capsule appears from the smoke, and is by default a short unlooped jingle. After it plays once, the game loads bgm_boss_05 for the fight proper.

But when you're going around selecting music, it's often not easy to find a short replacement piece to sub in for 04, and lots of good final boss music has an intro that you'd want playing over that part anyway. You can try to cut the tracks just right so that 04 flows directly into 05, but you'll find that there's an unavoidable gap in playback of about 0.08 seconds while the game swaps tracks. So how do you make it work cleanly?

The answer is pleasantly simple. bgm_boss_05 is loaded in specifically after 04 plays once, not at a fixed point in the scripting. And there is nothing that says 04 ever has to stop. Set a loop point in 04 and it'll play seamlessly from the moment the capsule appears through to the end of the fight, solving the gap problem by ignoring 05 entirely.

But I Want To Mod the Cast Theme

Yeah, you and me both.

*sigh*

The two credits themes are stored in the \demo\ folder with all the other cutscene music, but the game doesn't reference those copies at all. The version of the staff roll that the game cares about turns up mixed in with the stage themes, but that still leaves us with a missing cast theme.

This doesn't mean that we can't change it, just that it's going to be annoying, and I may have been fibbing a little when I said you wouldn't have to unpack an archive.

For this, you'll need FluffyQuack's Arctool and its corresponding batch files, as found here: https://test-steamproxy.haloskins.io/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=601818667

Extract them into the same folder. Of the batch files, we only need pc-re6.bat.

The Process:

Find the following file in your MM11 folder:
..\Mega Man 11\nativeDX11x64\arc\demo\scn00_09.arc
Back it up, then drag it onto pc-re6.bat in the Arctool folder. This will extract its contents to a new folder named \scn00_09\.
Inside that folder, find the following file:
..\scn00_09\sound\stream\demo\00_09\wave\bgm_ev_05_01.255D51CD
It's another copy of the cast theme! Why it's buried in here, I have no idea, but this is the one the game actually uses. Despite the funky looking extension, it's just another bog standard .sngw file, so overwrite it with the replacement track of your choice.
Back in the main Arctool folder, drag the entire \scn00_09\ folder onto pc-re6.bat. This packs it back up into an .arc file.
Overwrite the original scn00_09.arc with your modified copy.

That's it! Good thing we don't have to do this with every track in the game, eh?

Version History

v1.1 — Added Tips and Tricks section, 10/23/2018
v1.0 — Initial publication, 10/9/2018

61 Comments

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Deep Weeb 22 Apr @ 5:09pm

Supposedly there's a tool that does allow you to modify .stq files somehow, but doesn't appears to support Mega Man 11 (only RE games), I have filled a request to add support so cross your fingers https://github.com/LuBuCake/MTF.SoundTool

Nali [author] 22 Apr @ 12:37pm

Interesting, I don't believe I ever tinkered with the .stq files inside the arcs themselves. :o

Deep Weeb 21 Apr @ 8:32pm

Ok there's a massive flaw I found with this method: since I'm swapping around the .stq files the stage music does change...but now none of the boss themes will play...

Will continue investigating
..

Deep Weeb 21 Apr @ 5:28pm

Okay, I think I was able to come up with a way to include tracks for all Wily Stages, but it's pretty hack-y: basically unpack the stage .arc files and replace the ".stq" file inside the "\sound\stream\stage" folder for something else (the catch: it has to be from a song that is already in use)
Luckily for me, the MN9 music mod replaces all challenge mode songs with the same EX mode song from MN9, leaving me with 3 extra songs to use (which, unlike the Wily Stages, do use unique sngw files instead of referencing one and the same)

Nali [author] 11 Dec, 2024 @ 12:19pm

I've never specifically tried messing with those games, but to my knowledge the file format for X4-8 is identical to the one here (and the Z/ZX collection).

Mateoski 11 Dec, 2024 @ 1:12am

Do you think you'd be able to make a guide for the X Legacy Collections?

Nali [author] 2 Jan, 2024 @ 11:10am

The simple but not entirely helpful answer is "it depends" because loudness is heavily perceptive and two different tracks at the same decibel level can come off very differently.

The Bomberman tracks I used for the example in the guide are super busy and almost completely fill the Audacity timeline and I probably should've cut them down by 3-4 dB in the end. For my big Battle & Chase pack and its relaxed pop-rock sound, I mostly just did a basic amplify on the OST files which drives the peaks to 0 dB, but most of the waveform of that set hangs out comfortably in the -0.5 to 0.5 band on the timeline.

The important thing is making sure your files all come in at about the same perceived volume, relative to each other and relative to the rest of the base game audio, and every music modding project I've ever taken on involves a lot of manual playtesting to fine tune volume levels in practice.

SilverRain 1 Jan, 2024 @ 11:01pm

super late comment
but what about the volume of the file? how loud should it be to not be too quiet?

Nali [author] 5 Oct, 2022 @ 12:15am

I don't know of new research and I haven't touched the modding side of the game in years at this point, I'm afraid.

Deep Weeb 4 Oct, 2022 @ 5:28pm

It was me who made that mod, and i can confirm that I put a different song for each Wily stage in post pro. In reality I created 4 variants of the Wily stage theme that will play for the entirety of it.
And that's exactly what I came to ask, any development on if it's possible to assign more tracks to each Wily stage? Even if it would mean a bit of extra coding?

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