Changing sounds

Community General Discussion
1

how do you change sound effects on abilities? I’ve looked around they people said you needed to create a Sounds/Spells folder in retail and that you have to replace the .ogg file. I did this but it still doesn’t work and I’ve also found a playsound(#) so I’m not sure if I should rename the .ogg file as the one I find in wowhead or the playsound id.

2

I did this in BFA launch, because Blizzard changed all the sounds for the hippogryph to be this high-pitched, irritating chirp instead of the sound they’ve always been…BUT, as of patch 8.1, that method no longer seems to work. :frowning:

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3

yeah I did some more research and apparently people were able to get it to work in 8.1 by moving the Sound folder into _ retail _ folder. I did this but it’s still not working and I’m not sure if the folder is named Sound or Sounds and where my .ogg folder should go.

4

If you know the path and filename of the sound you want to replace it is pretty straightforward.

Here is an example:
I wanted to replace the Human Male aggro noise with the “ni!” sound from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I know this sound is called “HumanMaleAggroA” and the path is Sound/Character/Human/Male.

In my Warcraft folder, under the retail folder, I create a Sound folder, then drill down, creating Character, Human, and finally Male folders all nested inside each other. Then inside the Male folder, I chuck my “ni!” sound, and rename it to HumanMaleAggroA.ogg.

The folder structure looks like this at the end:

World of Warcraft
 |_retail_
	|Sound
	     |Character
			|Human
				|Male
					HumanMaleAggroA.ogg

The pipe ( | ) characters just indicate a sub-folder, they are not part of the file name.

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5

I created a “Sound” folder under “World of Warcraft,” at the same level as “Data” and “retail”; I’ll try moving it under “retail” and let you know if that fixes the break in 8.1.

6

This is annoying me to no end because I did all of that but the sound files still don’t work

7

What’s the sound you want to replace?

8

Okay, moving my Sound folder under retail resolved the issue in 8.1.

9

I am trying to replace SPELL_MA_Revamp_Arcane_Blast_Impact_4_Charges. On that note I am replacing the arcane blast impact sound.

my folders are in retail/Sound/Spells/ SPELL_MA_Revamp_Arcane_Blast_Impact_4_Charges.ogg and because I wasn’t sure about the spell itself I also did 0-4_charges.ogg with the same sound effect but nothing works.

10

I extracted all the sound files from the client in 8.0, and can’t find any containing the word impact. Unless this sound was added later, it doesn’t exist. I can only find
spell_ma_revamp_arcane_blast_cast_01.ogg
through
spell_ma_revamp_arcane_blast_cast_06.ogg

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11

Sweet that kinda worked I altered parts of arcane blast but some parts are still the same and they overlap with one another. How did you extract the sound files?

12

It’s a bit messy. You use a program called cascview.exe, It extracts pretty much any files from WoW, Sounds, textures, etc. You need a current listfile to tell it where the files are.
The most recent one I can find is here: https://github.com/wowdev/wow-listfile/blob/master/listfile.txt

If all you want is the sounds, edit the listfile first to remove all lines that don’t begin with sound. There are 177720 sound files alone. The extracted sound files take up 7.7 GB on my system. I extract the files so I can play them locally to confirm they’re the ones I want to remove / edit.

On the overlap, they often use multiple files for an action, so you may have to change more than one to silence something.

I’d love to see an in-game command “/sounds(n)” that displays a list of all sounds played in the last n seconds, along with buttons for Play, Silence, and Show Path.

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13

@OP - You could possibly get away with not extracting the sound files. The list file lists all the files with their paths. Wowhead’s sound database lists the sounds and allows you to play them -

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14

Hi, sorry for necro, but I’m trying to replace the Blood Elf regular attack noise (the weird yelp she does) for my DK. I made an ogg file and put it in [ retail \ sound \ character \ bloodelffemalepc \ bloodelffemalepcattackc.ogg ]. But I’m still hearing the old sound. Any advice?

15

Sound replacements are no longer possible with 8.2 only muting them via addon

16

Sound replacement works in classic. Just follow Splutmuscle’s description above but instead of placing “sound” directory into the “retail” folder, place it in the “classic” folder. Also I used Leatrix addon to find the sound name and path. The file name in Leatrix had some numbers following the OGG extension. Do not use these numbers, just end the file name in .OGG.