*I'm sure an admin will let me know if its wrong to post this here.*

I'm tired of the same old music from the guitar in TS3. I want to change that but haven't the ability to mod. I am posting however to say I am a musician with access to studios to record and I play rock/metal guitar.

I went through the wiki/tuts and didn't find anything on how to throw out the old music or non-replacement? (maybe buy-able?) so was hoping someone had thought of it or had a look into it. I can record all original compositions of guitar for the mod so if there is someone who is interested, I would like to collaborate.

-Sparky
p.s. I am studying Music at University, if it helps.

The guitar tunes can be found in the FullBuild1 file, and they can be changed, replaced with other tunes or sounds. But as far as I can find out these other new tunes have to be from somewhere else in the game, the tunes from the stereo stations for example. I've replaced the loading screen music and CaS music and Build/Buy music with other in-game music; the guitar tunes are the same type of files.

The problem is that mp3 or other standard audio formats don't work, I've tried these; the game won't play them. So what one needs to do is take your original tunes and encode them in one or other of the EA Games internal audio codecs, of which there are several. EA keeps these codecs or decoder/encoders to themselves, they aren't available anywhere. If one or more of these codecs/encoders were created by someone or could be found somewhere I would certainly be willing to mod your music as replacements for the guitar tunes. Examples of these codecs are EAmpeg3 and adpcm_ea_r3. This last one I've been looking for as I think it is the format for the sound on the TV.

Ok so bare with me, a modder still needs to find the codecs/encoders that TS3 uses, before anyone can replace (etc..) sound files. That right?

EDIT:
http://hideki.modthesims.info/wiki....s_3:Audio_Video

All I found was this. (thought it might benefit others if I posted it here.)

As far as I can tell, this is the case, yes.

Sorry for the Necro, but saves from going over everything again. See OP for details, and I think the answer has been FOUND!

External Link:
http://uoem.com/forums/showthread.php?t=19609

Sims 3 audio codecs cracked.

The thread there doesn't give anything useful whatsoever that I can see. Ripping the Sims3 music out of the game to play it as mp3 in an outside player is what's being discussed there. Moving outside music into the game and getting the game to play it is different.

I have to agree with Shimrod. ffmpeg can only decode but not encode the EA XAS format, and there don't seem to be any tools that can encode it. Maybe it's because of technical reasons, e.g. headers that can't be reverse-engineered but can be ignored for decoding. Maybe it's because of "political" reasons, i.e. programmers don't want/dare to implement an encoding functionality for EA XAS. The bottom line is, that it's impossible to bring custom audio files into the game for now.

If you wanted to take the time to create your own mod, I realize this would be difficult for you not knowing how to mod, but if you really wanted to...

Instead of just fooling around with all that sound converting stuff create a mod that links directly to mp3 files and plays them directly. Since the game loads custom music files simply by indexing them as key, name and artist...and key being the full path to the mp3. I'm sure you could rig up something.