So, do you guys use the custom radio feature in Freetime? If so, what radio stations do you have, and what songs are on there? I only ever have custom radio stations playing, and I have two for 2000's music and one for holiday music.

Music is another big obsession of mine for my game. I disabled all of the music that came with the game and added my own music. I had so much at one time I had to get sensible and purge my files. I have house music that plays for the DJ Booth House Mix; Hip Hop music for the Gym, Zen mediation music for the world music station that plays at the Tai Chi Studio. I’ve got the custom Jazz & R&B Speakers — so I play Jazz music at the upscale restaurants and at the Jazz Club. I’ve got soft rock, R&B, classical, a little gospel, Christmas music, and Reggae Music for the Reggae Lounge. I also customize radio stations for Sims who are into music & dance. I really have fun with adding music to my game.

I've never made one. I mostly have music from my computer playing in my headphones and the game music turned off.

I have WSIM, and KSIM.

WSIM has more of the "classic" stuff. "Busy", "Mr. High and Mighty", etc. KSIM, is a Metal station.

Mine has all the music from my Sims 1 folders, and it's called "Sims 1 Station" (creative title, am I right? Lol). It's the most relaxing station to listen to, because all of the default stations (as well as other custom music I've added to the pop station) get on my nerves after a while. Sims 1 Station calms me down when it's on and I don't get annoyed by it always being on.

I have these, most of the tracks are from other Electronic Arts games:


Oh man, I really do wish there was a custom station community lot speaker!

I have a classic rock station (mostly made up by whatever classic rock tracks catch my fancy at the moment, I rotate it every few months) and an alt-rock station that was curated by my friend (who was awesome enough to even go to the effort of cutting down some of the longer tracks and leveling the volumes).

Ooooh, you should not really have asked this, my friend. But you did, so here I go damn it.

I know for a fact that the more hacks and mods, the slower your game. This also applies to music, so I keep the default music and dump some of my preference in new radio stations. Now, my sims do not really listen to the radio for so long, but I do enjoy playing them on a normal sim Saturday while they go through their routines and listen to, I do not know, the Synth Pop station which mostly consists of Depeche Mode. Or when some my of teens are studying in their rooms, everything depends on their personalities. Lilith may be listening to Slipknot if she recently argued with Mary-Sue or to Pearl Jam if she is brooding, whereas Angela listens to James Blunt or the cheery music that comes with Pop, which I honestly love. Not all of them, but A Pocket Full of Sunshine, Sweet About Me, Hot 'N Cold and Smile are all songs that I was thrilled to find in this radio station, so I keep them and preserve the Sim ambience as a bonus!

Also, I have some 'proper' music for slow dance . Does it ruin the sim ambience? Yes. Do I think that a couple of adults on the edge of becoming elders look adorable dancing to Walking On The Moon, by The Police? Absolutely. So naturally, I do not care about living up to the cartoony ambience

And of course, I have a station dedicated to music I deem relaxing yet melancholic. I particularly loved that one time Daniel was caught cheating on Mary-Sue with Nina, just as the family was beginning to actually become a family, and a few days later, on a grey Sunday, the twins decided to keep bonding with each other for the sake of their hard-working mother who did not deserve any of that, preparing breakfast together and listening to Dreams, Fleetwood Mac. Mary-Sue reluctantly got up for work, and it was nice to find her daughters chatting at the table and a pancake waiting for her for a change.

What else...? Oh, many of my joyful adults and 'young' elders listen to 70's and 80's music to lighten up the mood on boring weekends! And on a different topic, I replaced the buy mode, build mode, CAS and etc, with MY music because sometimes I take too long.

There are days where I just play like that, and days where for some reason I just want silence and disable music altogether and if someone even looks at the radio, they get killed by flies. Sometimes I want to listen to the game's music, too, so I reactivate them in CAS and all those loading screens.

Long answer, but you asked



Amen!

With Don Lothario and other like Sims in mind, I have a WooHoo station. I don't remember all the songs on it right now (I haven't used it in a while), but I know "Ooh La La" by Goldfrapp is one of the songs.

I downloaded a small radio from AroundtheSims, and use cheats to put it up on the wall so I can also use it on community lots, such as nightclubs.

how can i add custom music? for instance i feel like the veronaville adults can all bond over 80s music

It is pretty simple. If you have Freetime, there is a new option to create new radio stations in game. Previously, you should add the .mp3 files in EA Games--Sims 2--Music

There are subfolders there. For CAS and everything, and there are also current radio stations. Normally, if I want to add the songs to custom stations, I merely dump the songs in a random folder, usually the one called Pop as it is my favourite :P

As for Buy Mode and the rest, well, I try to respect the folders, but I do not think the game gives a shoot about them. In the game settings, there are songs listed for each section, but I end up listening to songs that are supposedly for Buy Mode in CAS, so...

You can also disable the game music, and only leave your own! Same goes for radio stations. It is all in the game settings.

where can i find .mp3 files for music by buying them?

If you use iTunes, you'd have to convert the files. Not a big deal. That's what I did for many of the WooHoo songs.

http://www.instructables.com/id/How...mp3-in-i-tunes/

I believe, though I would have to check since I haven't done this for such a while and I'm not on my usual machine, that Amazon songs are already MP3s. I don't recall having to convert those at all.

Hmm, although I've never set up custom radio stations, that is tempting to set one up. Once I used to add my own music onto existing stations and even leave only my favorite Sim songs enabled. RnB is the only station which I enjoy all the songs from there. However, I don't listen to game music often at all.

foobar2000 can also convert files to MP3. I have a preset that actually drops it into one of the music folders in TS2.

Before I started using foobar2000, though, I generally used winLAME. Would still recommend it. Solid little program.

On my old laptop, I threw a bunch of mp3 files into my Sims Music folder, separated out - Pop and Oldies was obvious, I think I threw more modern stuff into New Wave, and at one point I chucked in a number of my favourite Zumba tracks...

That last was hysterical one night, as we have a Celtic/Bluegrass number to which the class routine is rather tiring (I have a love-hate relationship with it)... seeing a sim dancing really badly to it had me in stitches!

In my experience converting music to .mp3 (and .ogg for Sins of a Solar Empire), I've used Audacity. Like the Filter's menu in Photoshop, there's a menu in Audacity that will allow the user to tweak their music in any way possible. My favorite tweaks are Bass Boost (which only an older version on my XP tower has) and Echo. If I want to laugh my butt off, I'll use Change Speed to make things sound ridiculous either way. For some reason I guffaw harder at slower speed (like a cassette player is about to die) than the faster chipmunk.

Sadly converting to .mp3 format degrades the quality of your music due to the nature of this lossy format. Ogg Vorbis is a better format, as it doesn't snip down the sound waves as much, but is still a lossy format. .wav and .flac are the best ones as they're lossless formats and don't compress as much, though .flac is still compressed more than .wav, but much less than an .mp3 formatted file. Sadly, Maxis had used .xa format for The Sims 2's audio files, which in turn is essentially a heavily compressed .wav, .ogg, or .mp3 format file. .xa format files are used most commonly in Play Station 1 and 2 titles.

The Sims 2 only can read .mp3 format files for custom music because the audio engine in use is designed to use .mp3 as its primary format for the music files. The music files stored internally within the audio .package files in the installation directory are .mp3 files converted to .xa format. The Sims 2 doesn't have the best audio fidelity due to Maxis using this rather dated audio system they have been using since at least SimCity 2000. SimCity 2000 was Maxis' first title to be ported to the original PlayStation console.

I deselect the music I don't like. I've used the Classic station for medieval music which I use in my medieval hood (pretending that someone is playing for the Sims) - for the richer families.

@frogz2007 - on the other hand, when I did a double-blind test between some lossless FLACs and 320kbps MP3s, I was able to differentiate them with around 86% accuracy. But I'm a bit weird. It's mostly the higher frequencies that tend to turn to mush first, cymbals are a pretty good example.

I actually don't mind 320, though MP3 isn't the best of codecs. There's another one that my friend uses, I think some form of AAC, that actually sounds better than MP3 and even at a lower filesize. But occasionally certain songs just don't go well through it and get chewed up pretty badly. I'll stick with my FLACs, thank you.

I'm reminded of some of the weird efforts I went to to get albums. I have a couple of cassettes and I actually got a double-ended audio cable and plugged one end into my portable cassette player and the other into the line-in in the back of my computer. But when I tried to record the cassette in Audacity I just got a lot of weird hissing noises overlaying the music. I have no idea what went wrong there, maybe some sort of interference.

Right now it's 90s pop (+ a little TLC), but most of the time I have the in-game music turned off because I don't like how it stops every time I pause. I still play Sims 2 music from the mp3s themselves for flavor. I have a playlist just for Sims that uses a lot of music from the original Sims, plus SimCity 3000.

Up until recently I played with the sound off and watched tv while playing. But on Thanksgiving Day, I took a look at the radio stations. I have now disabled all of the music that came with the game and added my own music. College Rock now plays songs like Hold Your Head Up by Argent, All Right Now by Free, Venus by The Shocking Blues and so forth. My Country Station now plays Swamp Witch and Wildwood Weed by Jim Stafford, and a bunch of Dr Hook songs like Silva's Mother, Cover of the Rolling Stone, and Baby Makes Her Bluejeans Talk. My Pop Station now plays a variety of the 70's pop songs. RNB now plays the Jackson 5. And I can't remember where I stuck my Duets at. As far as my neighborhood goes Jefferson Starship has that covered (but now I tend to stay in the neighborhood longer). Buy mode has Foreigner as it star. And Build mode has Three Dog Night as it's star. And CAS has for it's star Chicago.

My sims rarely buy stereos but are buying them now. I get a kick out of watching them dance to Classic Rock. I also noticed I enjoy playing my game better since my music has been installed. I use to rarely watch tv but always listened to the radio. So It is a welcome change.

I did not know that so I did clear out the "Surf" station folder. As I do have a thing for lounge/relax music I added some of that instead. Suits quite good since all of my sims got the "Hula flu" and dance hula to everything.
Here are my list (so far) :

Andrea Ferrari - Sensual seduction
Coby Hobart - Swirl around
Mark Watson - Long flight home
Bikini Beats - White beach
Pianochocolate - Forgotten love

I have all the sims 1 build/buy/neighborhood music in their equivalent folders for 2. I think I also had some other songs that I threw into random radio stations a while ago, but I can't remember every single one. I remember hearing Africa by Toto, and White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane (which is super fitting when there's a bubble blower around :p)....and probably more, I forgot,