Hey there

I was planning on revamping my two Music To Their Ears mod packs late last year, but I had a hard drive crash in January of 2023, meaning all of my resource data (mp3 files, used programs, game soundtracks etc.) as well as my Sims 3 folder containing all my saved games and mods are gone.
Luckily, I found the will to re-do the entirety of my music packages once again, even if it meant starting from scratch. So start from scratch I did.

The original plan was to simply fix some minor spelling mistakes in the music files I had and equalizing every mp3 file to 89 dB to prevent audio volume spikes. But, seeing as I was already at it, I decided to vastly expand the selection of music as well, especially in the first MTTE pack. That means, where the former Synthwave station added 14 songs, the new and improved version will add a ridiculous 50 tracks (yes, fifty.) Equally, the add-on to the Country station formerly contained only four tracks from The Sims 2 Pets, but now contains 41 tracks, including all of the Cottagecore music from The Sims 4 Cottage Living, several pieces from Cities: Skylines - Country Road Radio and a plethora of royalty free instrumental music found on YouTube.

However, here is where the problems begin. While playtesting, I noticed that one track for the Disco add-on and a whole 25 of the 41 Country tracks simply don't show up in the game after I ran them through Broadcaster and I can't figure out why. They are normal mp3 files, all extracted either from YouTube with the same tool and the exact same settings as all the other tracks I want to add, extracted from the Sims 2 and Sims 4 game files using SimPE and TS4 Sound Tool respectively, or - in the case of the tracks stemming from Cities: Skylines - were converted from ogg to mp3 using Audacity.
The mp3 files that don't show up in game work fine everywhere else, I put them on my phone and can listen to them without problems, I added them to The Sims 2 as custom music where they also work just fine. However, I then tried adding all the tracks that won't show up into a separate testing station for The Sims 3 (called "Test Station"), and - nope. The Test Station shows up in game, but doesn't contain any playable songs. No other mods were running in my game at the time, so no conflict was really possible.

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to why exactly those files won't work with Broadcaster. The four Cities: Skylines ogg track for the Disco add-on work as intended in mp3 form, whereas the three ogg tracks taken for the Country add-on don't. Three of the four tracks from The Sims 2 Pets are recognised in game, whereas one isn't even though it works in the currently available version of my mod. Heck, four of five mp3 files literally just copied and renamed from The Sims House Party work, one doesn't.
I tried re-extracting the files from their sources, re-converting them to mp3 again, changing the mp3 tags to exclude certain characters, all to no avail. I am completely stumped and quite bummed out, too.

Another thought I had was the sheer number of pieces, but... while the 41 tracks long Country add-on does not work, the new College Rock station containing 30 tracks and the new Synthwave station containing 50 tracks do work, I tested it in game. Maybe it has to do with the fact that those are completely new stations instead of add-ons to existing ones? I have no clue.

Maybe someone on here knows a solution and would like to help? I will happily provide the files so anyone willing to help can try different things that I can't think of. Here's to hoping someone can get this fixed, because I spent several days just sitting in front of my laptop for over ten hours each looking for music, typing the new readme files, designing cheesy banner art for each and every mod pack (each with their distinct colour and font choice)... Below, I attached a zip file containing all the non-working mp3 files and a txt files containing their names for reference. Download links to the finished ReadMe pdf files are: Country and Disco.

So, any help would be very much appreciated
Lots of love and have a nice day!
~ Lukas / LuMaRainbow / Nasenfahrrad