Customized soundtrack

Players can customize the music they want to hear in-game by adding playlists (and sound files) to the Guild Wars 2 documents folder.

Customizing

Find the Music folder in the GW2 documents folder. The default location is Users\[Your Name]\Documents\Guild Wars 2, next to the Screens folder (i.e. where GW2 places your screenshots. Please note that this will vary depending on your operating system. For Windows XP for example, it is in Program Files\Guild Wars 2. In Win7 it is in Documents\Guild Wars 2. On Mac OSX it was in /Application Support/Guild Wars 2/p_drive/User/Application Data/Guild Wars 2, but is now in /Users/[Your Name]/Documents/Guild Wars 2. You may need to create this folder if it does not exist.

Methods

With windows Media Player.

1. Make a new folder called "Music" inside Documents\Guild Wars 2\ (Documents\Guild Wars 2\Music)
2. Right click on that folder and select the "Include to Library" option then select Music; the folder will be part of your Music Library after that
3. Open Windows Media Player and create a new playlist using one of the defined names (for example MainMenu)
4. Fill the Playlist with Music you like (you can add/remove later as well)
5. Right click on the playlist and select "Open File Location"
6. For the final step, cut the playlist and paste it inside your Music folder (Documents\Guild Wars 2\Music)

With VLC media player.

1. Create a folder named with the associated playlist name
2. Put all the MP3 music you want inside of it
3. Right click on the folder and choose "Add to VLC playlist"
4. In VLC, go to media and choose "Save Playlist"
5. Select .m3u and name it with the associated playlist name, eg: BossBattle.m3u
6. For the final step, put the generated .m3u file in Documents\Guild Wars 2\Music folder.

With iTunes.

• Right click then "Export" to the Music folder mentioned above in Customizing in .m3u format works seamlessly with the game mechanics.

Complementary information

Example

If you create a playlist called Ambient.m3u, the game will play that while you travel around the world (instead of the default ambient music).

Testing

To test how this feature works, create a playlist called MainMenu. Then export that playlist to the Music folder mentioned above in Customizing. Load the game and the selected music should now play on the character selection screen.

Order of Songs

You can open the playlist file with a basic text editor, such as Notepad, to see what order the files have been placed in. Guild Wars 2 will usually play the file at the top first, and for MainMenu it will never randomize the order after that; for all other playlists, after the first song plays, the next is chosen at random. The same song can be chosen more than once before going through the entire playlist, or even repeated several times. Songs will continue to be chosen at random until a new playlist is accessed (say, Underwater), at which point the first song of that playlist will play.

Certain areas in the game, such as Heart of the Mists and most Dungeons, have their own soundtrack that ignores any custom playlists. Other places in Guild Wars 2 do not have music at all, such as some parts of the Dragonbrand. When entering these areas, custom playlists will only continue to play until the end of the current song.

Some cutscenes, such as viewing Vistas, will end the current song and advance it to the next one after they finish.

Available playlists

The game currently recognizes ten playlists:

Playlist	Used during
Ambient	Default playlist when no other criteria are met
Battle	"Large" fights involving many foes (~5 or more enemies); some personal story steps; PvP; when player's health reaches 50% or lower (the custom music will continue to play until combat ends)
BossBattle	World bosses and some Dungeon bosses; some personal story steps; some Activities
City	When inside one of the main cities, such as The Black Citadel, but not always
Crafting	While using a crafting station (not tested). [verification requested]
Defeated	Upon being Defeated
MainMenu	At the character select screen
NightTime	When in some explorable areas and it is nighttime (the moon is out)
SAB	When inside Super Adventure Box
Underwater	Any time aquatic headgear is equipped. Overrides most other playlists
Victory	Music that plays after World bosses or Meta events. Additionally, plays in some personal story steps
Vista	When viewing vistas
RataSum	When inside Rata Sum (doesn't seem to work)
BlackCitadel	When inside Black Citadel
Grove	When inside The Grove
LionsArch	When inside Lion's Arch (doesn't seem to work)
DivinitysReach	When inside Divinity's Reach
Hoelbrak	When inside Hoelbrak

Each playlist can designate a primary and secondary playlist to look for. Most playlists default to Ambient if they do not exist; this allows you to create just one custom playlist to override the in-game music.

Supported media

Playlist formats

• .asx
• .m3u
• .pls
• .wax
• .wpl

Audio types

Anything covered by FMOD (by default) including:

• .aiff
• .flac
• .mp3
• .ogg
• .wav

Many old-school formats are also supported including .mid or .it files. Native iTunes playlists are not supported. .m4a files are not supported.

Bugs

• If using an m3u playlist, files with a hash sign (#) in either the filename or the generated "extra info" (artist or display title) may cause that playlist to function improperly or not at all.
  • For example, "Mozart Piano Sonata #2.mp3" should be renamed to "Mozart Piano Sonato No 2.mp3" or such, for both the filename and display title.
• Music files with the character ' (apostrophe) in their names work (e.g. Gwen's Theme.mp3); however, care must be taken with some text editors to make sure it's the proper apostrophe character, and not a "smart quote" used by many editors. If you're having issues, you can use the ' code instead.
• Music files with special characters (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc.) in the file and metadata might not work. Remove these from the file, and it will work.
• If the playlist does not play, open the playlist file in a text editor and check that the media src tag points to the correct location for the music. ie. src="C:\Users\Public\Music\Song.mp3".
• Using relative paths in an m3u playlist may cause problems, so if you want to put your actual music files in the Music folder, use absolute paths in the playlist (i.e. C:\Users\Somebody\Documents\Guild Wars 2\Music\song.flac instead of just song.flac).
• Other types of metadata not commonly found on songs may cause the playlist to skip over them.
  • For example, some audio files may have "LOOPSTART" and "LOOPEND" defined in the metadata to allow other games to loop them as background music continuously. Guild Wars 2 does not support this, but seems to have problems with custom soundtrack songs that have such metadata.
• The last entry in the playlist will be ignored if it doesn't end with a new line character.
  • You can easily get around this by simply putting in a dummy sound file at the end of the playlist: some random, brief sound file that you don't intend to actually use in your playlist. Since the file won't play, due to being at the end of the list, it won't affect your playlist in any way and prevents this bug from happening.
• Audio files don't seem to work, you have to always use playlist format (.m3u).
• Had issues working with (.mp3) format on Windows 11, which ends up leaving a blank music in-game. Converting the songs to (.ogg) format solved the issue.