Let's talk about custom music

[Noa.7490]

Back when the feature was introduced, like many other players, I thought it was a very interesting concept. It reminded me of the old days of Baldur's Gate when you could use custom voice files for your character. For GW2 the process of adding music is fairly simple but unfortunately there's a couple of hiccups. Custom music doesn't always work as it should. Your experience could certainly differ from me but here's what I have observed:

 

1. Often while I'm in battle, a large one but not a boss one, casual ambient music still carries on like nothing is happening. Happens in 9 battles out of 10.

2. Boss battle music seems to be affected with the same problem. I'm in a mob battle during the Dragon's Stand Meta, fighting Champions and such, while casual ambient music still plays. But when it does occasionally kick in, it seems to always replay the same music track despite the fact that I have 12 tracks listed in the Boss Battle folder.

3. Underwater sometimes takes a long time to kick in, sometimes several minutes and when I hop out of water it keeps playing and playing.

4. I currently have 90 music files for Ambient but the game insists on always replaying the same four or five ones over and over again, same goes for Night Time. For the record, all the music files are identical in their format (all in mp3) and the playlist (m3u) has been verified, and cross-checked with the Music folder more than once. No error found.

5. Perhaps it's a bug, and I don't know if other players have experienced this, but in Tangled Depths, often during the Chak Gerent event but not always, there's an ominous piece of music, lasting four of five seconds, that keeps looping incessantly and keeps doing so even when you are far away from the Ley Line Confluence or any of the lanes. The only way to make it stop is to leave the map instance entirely.

 

On a further note, since 2012 the game world has expended a lot and provided us with more environments. We have Nordic areas (Northern Canada and Scandinavia) , desert areas (southwestern US), desert areas (North Africa), Jungle (Central America), devastated areas (Orr) and suc. Each having the possibility of different music types. As much as I like the custom music feature, maybe it would be time for Anet to check into this and maybe rework it a bit not only to fix it (I do not believe it's a very complicated feature) but also to add new music areas, as I've just stated. When roaming the Crystal Desert or any environment, I would like to hear music that would fit said environment. And for it to work properly (otherwise what's the use of a feature, as interesting as it can be, if it's clunky and malfunctioning? ) it needs some attention.