Sounds and Music

Sounds and music files in NWN come in a great many forms. Basic sound files can be PCM encoded WAV files (rare) or MP3 files (much more common and highly recommended to use in pretty much all cases).

They no longer need to be stored in folders and can be added to hakpacks or nwsync in EE.

This guide will use Audacity to export files, which is open source and freely available.

Types of File

The extension for these are always BMU (music) or WAV, regardless of the files type. Confusing but it is how the games resource manager loads the files, it doesn't reflect the file contents. You can use on Windows Media Player Classic to play all the game files and inspect their bitrates and types.

WAV vs MP3

The general rule is don't use WAV for any sound file. It comes with a huge file size, and with little benefit to quality.

You can use MP3 for any type of sound regardless of if the resource type being WAV or BMU. It is highly recommended since sound files can get very large, and large amounts of small files also get very large such as voicesets or sound effects.

The game uses constant bitrate not variable. See notes further below on encoding standards.

For MP3s for anything other than a music file with the BMU extension, make sure you add a header - eg; using Notepad++ - to the very start of the file (with no new line):

BMU V1.0

File Requirements

Filenames must be 16 characters or less like any other resource in the game. The basic format recommendations are for files be 41,000 or 44,000 kHz, and mono or stereo as required. Some Bioware files use a lower kHz value. The limits of what NWN:EE supports will be sorted over time (it uses OpenAL so should support a lot larger range of formats).

File and Sound System Limits

Apart from the file name, some music tracks are over 10 minutes in length, so there is no apparently size limit as such (Although note NWSync has 15MB file size limit). However there may or may not be issues if a sound file plays for an exceedingly long time if not a music or ambient sound track, since it could reset or cutoff depending on how the sound system works.

Ambient and music tracks also can cut out randomly or reset and start from the beginning, most obvious if alt-tabbing the game. If you make a good music track make sure the start of it comes in nicely - else it'll be really, really repetitive. Delays between it playing again and a lower volume can help. The game has a music volume slider.

There are also obvious...limitations with NWNs ancient sound system (in EE and Diamond). The game only plays a limited amount of sounds effects, the 3d positional audio sometimes decides to rapidly cut out or rapidly increase the loudness of sounds - even, annoyingly, in cutscenes. There is little to no way to script better sounds (as in use all the pitch, volume and randomness settings available in the Sound Object the toolset has) since PlaySound is so limited and buggy, and playing a sound as part of a voiceline also has limits.

Even more of an issue, the audio files are all also rated in the same "volume slider" used by the game. Which means spells, rain, or that walking sound all have the same volume meter. "voices" played in effects also get this treatment. The camera or PC also can get very close to sound effect sources and alter the position of audio through the camera rapidly.

Working around PlaySound() limits: although PlaySound() isn't an action (you don't get the little yellow square on the screen), if you assign a PlaySound() to someone, it will wait for their current action queue to finish before playing.  This can cause frequent playback misses if action queues are at issue.  If you really need a sound to be played, one way to ensure it occurs is to create an empty/non-visual effect in visualeffects.2da and put your wave file in the SoundImpact column.  You can then apply the effect and reliably play the associated sound via scripting using ApplyEffectToObject() and the visual effect.

A note on Ambient Effects

The game has a limited palette of ambient effects which add echos and other things. If you've got more information on these write it here.

BMU format

There isn't particularly anything special, as noted here. These are MP3 files. The extension likely stands for "Bioware Music". Renaming a MP3 to BMU works fine as long as it matches the example settings.

Just in case you missed the note above, BMU files cannot be actual WAV encoded files. However .WAV files can be BMU ones.

As noted above if you have a .WAV file but MP3 / "BMU" contents you need to have the start of the file be: BMU V1.0, eg in Notepad++:

2da Files

Information to follow, but in essence, list the file name and an appropriate TLK (or sometimes "Quoted Name") reference to see the option in the toolset, and it sort itself in game.

Music Prefixes

There are two main prefixes that Bioware used for their files.

For battle music, to show up in the toolset the prefix must be used.

It should be you can still set the track using script commands or GFF edits (since they refer to just a ID number)

Sound Effect Prefixes

These help load the right sounds - else you'll be looking through literally thousands if you select "All Resources" which is the only way the toolset can load a sound effect, say, named "sound.wav".

They are defined in rrf_wav.2da - you can edit this or just use Biowares defaults below. The shorter prefixes load everything "under" them, so "Ambient_SingleShot" loads the People, Animals etc. ones all at once.

There may be some files in the default game which don't come under these naming conventions, selecting the "Blank" category can show them all.

Encoding WAVs

The WAV settings are pretty simple. Using Audacity, an export of a file as a mono/stereo file with WAV (Microsoft). There are not any real options to export it, and an example is below:

Bioware WAVs are reasonably rare - an example one encoded: adpcm_ima_wav, 44100 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 177 kb/s while another is adpcm_ima_wav, 22050 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 88 kb/s.

There should be no need to encode any special headers, there are various WAV types - but seriously - why would you use this over a well encoded MP3 file anyway? Please don't use WAV files nowadays.

The one I encoded as a working test: pcm_s16le, 44100 Hz, 1 channels, s16, 705 kb/s

Audio
Format                         : PCM
Format settings                : Little / Signed
Codec ID                       : 1
Duration                       : 2 s 749 ms
Bit rate mode                  : Constant
Bit rate                       : 705.6 kb/s
Channel(s)                     : 1 channel
Sampling rate                  : 44.1 kHz
Bit depth                      : 16 bits
Stream size                    : 237 KiB (100%)

Encoding MP3s

MP3s are generally more sensible since it saves a lot of space. It appears NWN likes constant bitrates of 128kbps or lower. Some of the original game ones are for instance 96kbps. It is recommended in modern times to just use 128kbps.

You can use higher bitrates - but make sure you test the files in game.

You shouldn't use variable or average bitrate, the game won't like that.

Remember to add BMU V1.0 at the start of the file for the game and toolset to load them unless they are using the .BMU extension (where this info is assumed), eg; using Notepad++ - to the very start of the file (with no new line):

BMU V1.0

Stereo MP3

These are for music and ambient tracks only it seems. Mono is needed for usual sound and voice files (the game does positional audio for where it will come from).

These are the settings used in Audacity:

This produces this kind of MP3:

44100 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s

Format                         : MPEG Audio
File size                      : 44.1 KiB
Duration                       : 2 s 795 ms
Overall bit rate mode          : Constant
Overall bit rate               : 128 kb/s
Writing library                : LAME3.100
FileExtension_Invalid          : m1a mpa1 mp1 m2a mpa2 mp2 mp3

Audio
Format                         : MPEG Audio
Format version                 : Version 1
Format profile                 : Layer 3
Duration                       : 2 s 795 ms
Bit rate mode                  : Constant
Bit rate                       : 128 kb/s
Channel(s)                     : 2 channels
Sampling rate                  : 44.1 kHz
Frame rate                     : 38.281 FPS (1152 SPF)
Compression mode               : Lossy
Stream size                    : 43.7 KiB (99%)
Writing library                : LAME3.100
Encoding settings              : -m s -V 4 -q 3 -lowpass 17 -b 128

Mono MP3

This is likely the most used filetype for sound effects. It should work in all cases WAV works, but this author hasn't tested every single sound playing instance (eg; footsteps, or weapon sounds). If it is a case that WAV is needed in any particular place in the game update this with a warning and list of cases.

It is recommended to pre-mix down to mono before exporting.

But in any case select the Force export to mono to be sure:

This produces this kind of MP3:

44100 Hz, mono, 128 kb/s

Format                         : MPEG Audio
File size                      : 44.1 KiB
Duration                       : 2 s 795 ms
Overall bit rate mode          : Constant
Overall bit rate               : 128 kb/s
Writing library                : LAME3.100
FileExtension_Invalid          : m1a mpa1 mp1 m2a mpa2 mp2 mp3

Audio
Format                         : MPEG Audio
Format version                 : Version 1
Format profile                 : Layer 3
Duration                       : 2 s 795 ms
Bit rate mode                  : Constant
Bit rate                       : 128 kb/s
Channel(s)                     : 1 channel
Sampling rate                  : 44.1 kHz
Frame rate                     : 38.281 FPS (1152 SPF)
Compression mode               : Lossy
Stream size                    : 43.7 KiB (99%)
Writing library                : LAME3.100
Encoding settings              : -m m -V 4 -q 3 -lowpass 20.5 -b 128