This is gonna be a short sweet guide. Mainly because its really easy to do and only took me around 30 mins of troubleshooting and problem solving to figure it out.
To begin with you’ll need a few tools.
- Your go-to audio converter/recorder (optional, if you already have all your music on your drive).
- SFIV Audio Manager, CSB Packer (http://aemods.pbworks.com/w/page/42053948/aetools)
- Mp3/WAV to ADX converter. I use PES Sound File Converter 1.8.
Now for the actual guide.
Start off by locating your sf directory (mines: program files\steam\steamapps\common\SFIVAE)
The folder you are looking for is called “resource”.
In here are two more folders, one called “battle”, the other called “ui”.
In the “ui” folder there’s another folder called “sound”, open that up for juicy stuff.
The “se” folder contains all the sound effects from the game, if you make your own music, you might enjoy playing around with these pieces here. But for now skip these.
The other folder “bgm” (as you might have guessed) is the Background Music.
BGM_MAIN.csb is the main screen (arcade, versus, online, training, options, quit, etc etc etc…)
Remember this location (just keep the window open, a lot of copy-pasta is required).
Now open up SFIV Audio Manager and navigate to the folder that contains BGM_MAIN.csb.
When you load it up it should contain the following (sizes might be off, no idea, ill let you guys verify)
Synth_s_bgm_87_wav (you can ignore this)
-Clip 1, 701266 Bytes
-Clip 2, 2801542 Bytes
Highlight one of them and click play, cool huh.
There is also another one called 88 but here’s where the actual details come into play.
Each .csb file contains a list of AAX files that contain a list of ADX files.
The way I understand it (someone tell me the proper formatting of each please) is that the .csb is a container, the .aax is a playlist, and the .adx are the individual sound files.
But anyways, back onto getting your own music into the game.
Copy and paste the file you want to replace into an empty folder, in our case it is the BGM_MAIN.csb file. So go back into your SFIV folder, click on BGM_MAIN.csb, copy and paste it into the empty folder.
Then grab your sound file you want, keep it in mp3 format if you are using the PES converter.
Load up the PES converter select the file you want to convert with add, and convert FROM mp3 TO adx.
The file should be exported from PES at the same site as the source…You now have a file readable by SFIV.
Next, open up CSB Packer, everything but the “sound bank” should be greyed, click browse on the “sound bank”.
Locate the file you just copy-pasta’d and open it in CSB. Now if you have done the BGM_MAIN.csb 4 blank slots should open up.
Click browse and add in your new .adx file you created through PES, make sure you add the file to each part of the open slot.
(You could place “nothing.adx” in there, but when you go to other menus nothing will play.)
Then click “create CSB” and a file called the same as the source with a .new extension will be located with the source. Note: Wait for the OK. to pop up before you start freaking out.
The new file will be much bigger than the old one.
Now copy the file with the .new extension (the one you just created) and locate the original file still in your SFIV directory. (resource\ui\sound\bgm)
and paste the file in there.
Then rename the BGM_MAIN.csb file to something like 2BGM_MAIN.csb. Just so you know where the original is and its left unchanged if you need/want to revert back.
Then on the file with the .new extension, remove the .new extension just by backspacing it out, and make sure it has the same name as the unchanged original file
in this case the file that says.
BGM_MAIN.csb -> 2BGM_MAIN.csb
BGM_MAIN.csb.new -> BGM_MAIN.csb
You can then load up the file in SFIV Audio Manager to see your work, also load up the game and hear your work.
Hope you enjoyed this and have fun customizing your game even more!
Note: I’m usually not too good at explaining things, if any question arises feel free to post here or pm me, I’ll try to get back to you ASAP.
Thanks for reading.