No Background Music Fix

Article written by Sir Arun
Published on 01-27-2013; updated on 07-06-2016
Tags: ,

INTRODUCTION

Greetings,

As you know, it is a well known issue that the background music AOK and TC originally shipped with, doesn’t work for many people.

The reason is that these soundtrack(s) were on the game CD, and older disc drives had the capacity to stream music from the CD while you were playing. Most people nowadays have DVD drives, and these do not have this capability. Also, those of you that own the Collector’s Edition will know that the game no longer requires a disc in the drive for you to be able to play, and thus, you won’t be able to hear the background music at all.

This tutorial aims to fix this problem and allow you to (finally! after all these years!) once again be able to enjoy the full AoE experience, provided you have the soundtrack as an .mp3 file (e.g. a quick scan of your Aoe II CD should yield you the Age of Kings soundtrack). If I am not mistaken, it is a 30 minute long music file.

Editor’s Note: Userpatch, released after the publication of this article, also includes a feature to add your custom game music playlist without having to enter a taunt.

HOW IT WORKS

1. Use Windows Media Player or itunes to rip the soundtrack(s) from the game CD. I did this with both the AOK and AOC soundtracks. If you didn’t use Windows Media Player, skip to step 3.

2. Note that WMP will usually create .wma files, so use a free audio converter to convert them to .mp3 format. There are tons out there on the net. 🙂

3. Now, *IF* you have more than 1 .mp3 file (the conquerors soundtrack for example doesnt come bundled as a 30 minute audio track, but as multiple songs), then you will need a program to combine all of them into 1 track. The free program I recommend is WavePad Sound Editor – you just need to drag and drop the music files one after the other into the program’s main window, then for each track, select everything, and cut and paste it into the first music track, that way creating a huge “combined” track, which you can then save in the default lossless .wav format, and then convert it to .mp3.

4. Assign the resulting single file a number like you would for a custom taunt file. I named it “50 AOK Track”.mp3

5. You need to move this file into the /Taunt folder in your Age of Empires II main game directory, and then when you launch a game and you can see your villagers and town center, you hit the enter button to open up the chat
window, and there, type the number “50” (without the quotation marks) and hit enter again. The soundtrack will start playing and it will stop when you exit the game and return to the main menu.

Unfortunately, changing the music volume in the options menu will not change the volume of the soundtrack (since it is a taunt file, after all), and it is a bit louder than the average villager’s voice, but at least this “fix” is better than the usual ‘home remedy’ where you played the soundtrack from your media player and then quickly switched back to the game, right? (it would play all over your main menu, the victory/loss screen etc.) And with Windows Vista, 7 and 8 also requiring you to kill explorer.exe to prevent the weird colour bug, keeping your media player application open is even harder.

ANYWAYS….long story short, remember that once the whole soundtrack has finished playing, hit enter again and type 50 again and it will start from the beginning once more.

TL; DR – INSTALLATION PATH

STEP 1: Copy the “50 AOK Track” .mp3 file to the following location:

For 32-bit Windows OS users:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\TauntC:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\Taunt

For 64-bit Windows OS users:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires II\Taunt

….i.e. the Taunt folder in your Age of Empires II directory.

STEP 2: When you start a new game, open the chat window by hitting the enter button, and then type 50 and hit the enter
button again.

STEP 3: Have fun playing AoE with background music!


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