I got it working. I'll post the mod soon with all 50-ish music files fully looped and replaced. Thanks goes to the creator of FF6explore, who improved his akb wrapper to make this project work.

UPDATE1 : I have failed. The looping issue seems to be encoded in the squaresoft akb file, which I don't know how to alter. Here is the story:

~What I did:
I took all the music .akb files using FFVIExplore, found orchestral music online, converted those to .obb, looped them by samples (LoopStart= and LoopEnd=) in Audacity, created an .obb that has the same type of content in the file (looked at an .akb file and noticed it only had LoopStart= and LoopEnd= , no authors or comments, etc), took the akb header info for all the files and put them in the new.obb files, renamed file.obb to file.akb, and put them in the game.

~The Result:

The result is that everything plays in the game, but the looping doesn't! It loops flawlessly in audacity, but the game doesn't seem to care where I put my LoopEnd=.


~Discoveries:
1): The game will only recognize new music up to the length of the original song. So if the original song goes for X samples, and my new song goes for Y>X samples, It won't recognize any loops or content beforehand.

2): All the loop information that the game uses is in the akb file. I tried making a song where all the loop information is within the original length of the song next. This resulted in the exact same looping behaviour in all previous attempts! It seems that the akb file contains not just the length of the song, but the entire loop content (despite the original ogg files containing loop data too).

If somebody can help me out with generating akb files from ogg files, that would be great!

TheMathKing

Hi all,

I come seeking aid for a complete music overhaul project I'm working on. This is for the PC\Steam version of the game, but I hear that the game files are identical so it could be useful for other ff6 formats.

I cannot get the songs that I've included in the game (I've done them all) to loop properly.

~What I did:
I took all the music .akb files using FFVIExplore, found orchestral music online, converted those to .obb, looped them by samples (LoopStart= and LoopEnd=) in Audacity, created an .obb that has the same type of content in the file (looked at an .akb file and noticed it only had LoopStart= and LoopEnd= , no authors or comments, etc), took the akb header info for all the files and put them in the new.obb files, renamed file.obb to file.akb, and put them in the game. I did this for all the music except for the opera scene and the final battle (was going to do that later).

~The Result:
The result is that everything plays in the game, but the looping doesn't! It loops flawlessly in audacity, but the game doesn't seem to care where I put my LoopEnd=.


~Discoveries:
1): The game will only recognize new music up to the length of the original song. So if the original song goes for X samples, and my new song goes for Y>X samples, It won't recognize any loops or content after X samples.

2): All the loop information that the game uses is in the akb file. I tried making a song where all the loop information is within the original length of the song next. This resulted in the exact same looping behaviour in all previous attempts! It seems that the akb file contains not just the length of the song, but the entire loop content (despite the original ogg files containing loop data too).

If somebody can help me out with generating akb files from ogg files, that would be great!

Hi everybody.

I actually replaced all the akb files with ones from various orchestral sources on the internet. I even finished looping them all today.

My main issue is that it isn't looping correctly in the game. Am I correct in assuming that the music files (the akb with the ogg format) should have LOOPSTART= and LOOPEND= ?

Once it's done, I'll release it and you guys can have my documentation and files. I didn't do the opera scene because that seems very complex. Some files have poor looping too, I've noted which ones.

I'll keep everybody posted on the update.