Anyone know how I can make a .BMU file? I looked around…no real tutorial on this or even some sort of program to do this. I want to make a small BMU of “we wish you a merry christmas” and “grinch music” (you know the song…you’re a mean one…Mr. Grinch"
…I downloaded that really awesome grinch model off the vault and would like to put him in an area with a Christmas scene…too bad one can’t attach the music to a placeable music in the toolset like you place like a campfire sound…that way in one part of the tileset I can have one of the songs play while in the other when you enter that part of the tileset…you would hear the other song…you know what I mean?
Does anyone know how to do this?..like to learn before christmas week to game with my friends and include it in my module.
This depends somewhat, on whether you are on EE or 1.69. All ways start with an mp3 file -
EE only
Change the extension from mp3 to bmu. This is one of the changes from 1.69. As there were no longer any legal problems (software patents, etc.) with them using mp3 files, BD made this change.
All versions
Use MP3toBMU 0.35 to do the conversion.
Alternatively
Open the mp3 file in a good plain text editor such as notepad++. Insert this exact text (including the space) at the very start of the mp3 file -
MP3 V1.0
Before EE was a thing I noticed that a bmu file was always exactly 8 bytes larger than the mp3 file that it was made from. So I did some file comparing and it turned out that all bmu files were just mp3 files with that added text.
FWIW MP3 files not only include the music data but can also contain some text as well. This makes it possible to edit the tags (artist, track name, style, etc.) using programs such as mp3nity. It also makes it possible to check if the mp3 has been pirated. Just open in your text editor and if it was bought from Amazon, for example, you will be able to read it in amongst the tags.
TR
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BTW, post-OC bmus have ~1KB long overheads. But you’re right that inserting BMU V1.0 at the beginning of the file makes NWN recognize the source mp3 as “bmu” and play it in game. The game simply looks for that magic number after which it scans the file for beginning of the mpeg stream. You can add any number of bytes after magic and it also works (i.e. BMU V1.0 WHARRGARBL).
Regarding the legal issues, such minor change obviously couldn’t protect anyone as patents were given for mp3 encoding and decoding subroutines, not file structure (which is an open standard). BW had to pay for it and probably used “bmu” just for obscurity, i.e. to discourage playing NWN music outside the game.
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Hey thanks Tarot_Redhand
Do you know how I would convert a youtube music video of the grinch song (as I can’t find it anywhere else) into a sound placeable to just place it in a specific area (that also can allow me to play the music in the whole area too if I decide to play it in the area rather than just in a specific area).
What steps would you take if YOU were to do this? (step by step)
Thanks for your help and pointing me to that tool on the vault.
Thanks NWShacker…So you really have to put this BMU V1.0 in front of every file?..spaces between the words included as in your example above?
For example if I wanted to name the grinch song I would do this:
BMU V1.0 GRINCH
Correct?
Use the tool @Tarot_Redhand linked. I haven’t tried it, but it should take care of mp3 → bmu conversion. My previous post is technical; you can ignore it.
You “name” the song by naming the file grinch.bmu and altering ambientmusic.2da to make it playable in the whole area. Alternatively, if you mix it down to mono (and convert to *.wav), you should be able to attach the song to a sound object you can directly paint in the toolset (this is probably what you want).
Regarding your previous post, you may want to search for “royalty free christmas music”. It’s trivial to download video and audio from YT, but sharing it via module would in most cases breach copyright of the song’s owner.
EDIT: you can find lots of free Christmas music in mp3 format here. I’m unaffiliated with that site. Do check its terms of use regarding reuse of content. Don’t forget to credit the original author!
EDIT2: “public domain christmas music” (or songs) should also work.
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