Sims 2 Music (The Redux)

Buurz was kind enough to let me post my own Sims 2 music mod. If you're looking to save hard drive space, his version is much lighter in size and is still a great alternative!

Sims 2 has the best music in the entire franchise by far in my opinion. It's one of the only soundtracks that I could listen to endlessly and never feel bored of it. So here it is, for Sims 3! There is a lot of content in this mod, so I'm going to split the description into sections. Please read all info very carefully so that the mod works properly!

Game Music
This mod includes all game music from The Sims 2 PC. To stay faithful to Sims 3's style, the main themes play at game startup instead of in map view like in TS2. The splash music plays on the loading screen, and this includes the two extra Nightlife remixes (Timo Maas and Lemon Jelly) that didn't really fit that well on the startup screen. This does mean that there isn't any map music whatsoever. I would like to put something there, but I'm clueless as to what. Let me know if you have any ideas! Also, please note the Housemix stereo station is included in the Nightlife game music files as it contains game music (and I didn't want to include duplicates in the stereo downloads). With this station I have included an additional remix of the Sims 2 Uni theme, as I thought it fit rather nicely. It is the Ralph Myerz and Jack Herren Band remix.

Extra Game Music
When using the non-replacement version of the mod, the Sims 3 music can override the Sims 2 music a little bit because there's more of it. I played MySims recently and thought that it sounded really similar to Sims 2 music (It was made by Mark Mothersbaugh/Mutato Muzika too), so I thought it would be a really nice addition to this mod. It's a tad cutesy, but after a while I really started to enjoy it and I think it blends quite well with the other music. I also found a bunch of unused Sims 2 music in the MySims game files so I felt like I owed the game something. I also recently played the PSP version of Sims 2 for the first time, and I knew I wanted to use the music somewhere in this mod. It stands out a bit much from the PC music, so I just decided to add two songs to the loading screen (And a couple to the Strange Tunes stereo station).

Stereo Music
It took absolutely AGES, but I've converted pretty much all of the radio stations (+ localised songs) and then some. This process took a lot longer than it should have, because I pretty much combed the internet for each track in search of higher quality releases. I didn't find much, but what I did find was rather cool. You can read more about that in the Technicalities section. Also, there were some stations that I thought were somewhat similar to Sims 3's (just named differently), so I've changed a couple of things around: The Techno station has been merged with the Electronica station, the Salsa station has been merged with the Latin station, the Indie Wave station has been merged with the Indie station and the Pop station has obviously been merged with the Pop station. If you'd like a full tracklist of all stereo songs, you can find one on the Sims Wiki here. There is also a section for localised music. I managed to find some of the console stereo music in a listenable quality, so I also added that to the mod. It includes:

• Pressure - Paramore
• Another World - Kitty Shack
• Suddenly - Ryan Ferguson
• Chameleon - The Humble Brothers
• Clearblue - The Humble Brothers
• Take Me Home, Please - Reggie and the Full Effect
• Upside - The Humble Brothers

I also added a cool little nostalgia station for some DS and PSP Strangetown tunes. I stumbled across a remaster of the DS soundtrack on YouTube, and I simply could not resist. I was fairly selective with what I added to the station as I didn't want to overload it. If there are any songs you think are worthy, please do suggest them! Thank you to gamefreak130 for his incredible Broadcaster Tool.

Bonus Misc. Stuff
I really wanted to include a lot of cool bonus stuff with this mod. I first came up with the idea of having the several intro clips from TS2 games as theater ambience. I've replaced three of the previous sounds with audio from the Sims 2, The Sims Castaway Stories and The Sims Pet Stories intros. I've added effects and remixed the audio a little so that the audio sounds like it's coming from within a theater. I did the same thing with the Curio Shoppe music from PSP! I added a little bit of reverb and some grocery store walla, and it sounded great as a Grocery Store loop. Lastly, I added the four ringtones from Sims 2 DS to cellphones. After careful deliberation, I decided to remove the looping behaviour of the ringing sounds because it seems like many people are annoyed by the repetitiveness of the default Sims 3 ringtones. After further testing, I realised this can muddle up audio events and eventually breaks sim audio, so I've looped the sounds for now. If anyone is interested, I can attempt to make a non-looping version again but it might be a little bit difficult.

You can preview all of the bonus content, including MySims and PSP music, and additional sound effects/loops below. I added video chapters for each file, but MTS doesn't seem to display them. Navigating to the YouTube watch page will allow you to see them.





Installation Instructions
The game music from this mod can be used in two ways. You can either add it to your other game music like an expansion pack, or install it as a default replacement, which will disable Sims 3 music. Note that this method will not disable map music, as this mod doesn't alter map music at all. If you're not intending to replace Sims 3's music, you can go ahead and just download whatever music packages you want in your game.

All of the bonus sound effect replacements MUST be installed to the Overrides folder as they are default replacements. Installing them anywhere else will have no effect on the game.

If you want to replace Sims 3 music, the process is a little more intermediate. If you're not comfortable editing an AUDT file, you must download all of the game music-this includes the bonus stuff (MySims and the PSP loading tracks). Make sure you install these to your Packages folder. Then you'll need to download the REPLACEMENT config archive at the bottom of the download. From these config packages, you may choose to install whichever ones you want. Just make sure that you install them to your Overrides folder so that they are loaded before the music files. If you want to try editing the AUDT files to remove music, you can do so with the Grid button in S3PE. You'll want to navigate to the samples block, and delete the instances that correspond to the music files you want to prevent from playing. You can find a full tracklist below that is sorted in the same order as the AUDT files. Not all of the tracks have official titles, so you can refer to my preview video above to find out what you're removing. The video has the tracks in the correct order.



IMPORTANT NOTES

The replacement version of this mod overrides the following files: music_theme.AUDT, music_mode_CAS.AUDT, music_mode_build.AUDT, music_mode_buy.AUDT and music_load.AUDT. The non-replacement versions will not conflict with anything, but DO NOT merge them together. If you'd like a combined package file with everything included, you can find the link to one in the comments.

Stereo music should not conflict with anything else. If you have a different station mod that has music under the same name as one of mine (e.g my Sims 4 Strange Tunes station), the two should merge.

Files overriden by my extra sound effects are as follows: (fullbuild1.package)

rhole_grocery_loop.AUDT
rhole_movie_film_comic01.SNR
rhole_movie_film_plot01.SNR
rhole_movie_film_twist01.SNR
phone_ring_cela_ui01.SNR
phone_ring_cela01.SNR
phone_ring_celb01.SNR
phone_ring_celb_ui01.SNR
phone_ring_celc01.SNR
phone_ring_celc_ui01.SNR
phone_ring_cele01.SNR
phone_ring_cele_ui01.SNR

If you install ALL of the stereo music from this mod, it can cause the Options menu to hang for a short while upon opening to load all of the music previews. If you want ALL of the stereo music, my combined package file version will cause much less lag in the options menu.

Although I have figured out how to achieve semi-functional looping, it isn't fully seamless quite yet. If you hear audio dropping out for a short while at the end of a loop, this is normal. MP3 encoders have to add silence to the beginning/end of files so it can disrupt seamless looping. I think the audio files can be edited to close this gap, but I haven't had any success thus far.

Every audio file in this mod uses the two file method (SNR header + SNS stream) so I can say with confidence that this mod is probably fully stable. If there is an instance of crashing or a loud distortion, it is very likely to be a result of my human error. Let me know if you have any problems!


Technicalities
Whew. Where do I even start here. So all of the MP3s encoded by me are encoded with lame3995ox64 using -Q 0 and --lowpass 20, normalised with ReplayGain and then shoved into SNR+SNS files. All of the music that I couldn't find better replacements for has been extracted directly from Sims 2 files and converted to the Sims 3 format with no quality loss (but still normalisation).

Basegame, University and Nightlife music are all encoded from FLACs I obtained from digital releases. I reviewed all of these files before encoding and realised that one of the Nightlife build songs was a crappy transcode, so I replaced it with the game version. The Sims 2 Uni theme was also a transcode, but I managed to find a proper version somewhere else.

I was trawling through the MySims gamefiles (as you do) and I somehow hit gold. Hidden were two tracks from Sims 2 Pets, in PCM, that I can only assume were used for testing the game or something. Then, months later, I found two more whilst looking through the MySims Kingdom files: the CAS and splash songs from FreeTime. Both seem to be mixed slightly differently from the final songs in the game-they're probably earlier versions of the songs that were polished before FreeTime's release. After a little bit of EQ, they sounded quite nice, so I swapped the CAS song and added the splash as an alternative loading track.

Some of the tracks from Seasons and Pets were used in the console port of Pets, so I knew I HAD to take advantage of this. I eventually came up with a pretty clunky method of aligning the two versions of each track to slightly mitigate the artifacts of each codec, and it surprisingly worked rather well. It's not perfect, but it certainly beats listening to the mushy artifacts of the original MP3s.

It would take too long to explain the source of every single stereo track in this mod. There are a few recycled tracks that made it into the various Sims Social volumes. I found a few genuine digital releases and some transcodes that were still better quality than the game files (even after I encoded them again). The only really notable thing I found apart from this was a Humble Brothers album that had MP3s of a slightly higher quality. This is also where the extra console music is from.

Much to my surprise, all of the MySims music was actually in PCM to begin with, so I just downsampled it with SOX and encoded it like I would anything else. The music from Sims 2 PSP was in ATRAC or ATRAC+, I'm not really sure. The composer of the Sims 2 DS music recently remastered all of the music and uploaded a bunch of the MP3s, so I downloaded those and just shoved them into SNS files. The ringtone sounds were included in this download, but I ended up having to reencode them because they had strange reverb and I wanted to downmix them to mono.


Additional Credits:
Mark Mothersbaugh and MANY other talented people
Peter and Inge Jones for S3PE Ben Moench for the EALayer3 tool
gamefreak130 for the Broadcaster Tool
mp3DirectCut
halb27 for lame3995o
PlaySims & PleasantSims for the Pleasantview world