I've had the disk of Irony and Omen Sade's Rising Sea album (great traditional Harp and Flute music by the brothers, saw them live) and recently thought: "This would sound great for some exploration and town music in Oblivion!" So I find my CD, rip it via Windows Media Player, and copy & paste the mp3s into their respective music/public and music/explore directories, as well as did archive invalidation via OBMM. All my other music I got via the internet worked fine, but it seems the ripped mp3s want to give me issues. I've checked several websites and they only state, "copy & paste your mp3 into it's folder and voila! you're done!" So does anyone have a resolution to the dilemma?

EDIT: FIXED! Forgot WMP rips music automatically to .wma format as opposed to mp3 :facepalm:

No idea why this is not working for you, as I have done the same without issue-- maybe try and convert them to .wav and then convert them back? I recall something about Windows Media Player having the option for copy protection, or something (I'm afraid I never use it, except for ripping basic .wav files, and converting them later, so do not know how accurate this is)-- if so, then converting them may strip this away, if it is the issue.

What issue exactly are you experiencing? Is the music refusing to play at all? Plays too loud? Too low?

OK, so I'm officially a moron... I completely neglected the fact that Windows Media Player rips music to .wma format by default! So CDM, thanks for making me check. I'm going to fix it now, and go bang my head against a wall :banghead: I can't believe I made such a new player mistake. :facepalm:

Here's a couple suggestions to keep in mind about adding outside tunes to your game, for what it's worth:

1) Keep the tracks of reasonable length and your hard disk optimized.
The Oblivion music engine is lazy. If there's a lot of loading going on in the background, it will often go for the smallest and easiest track to find, skipping the longer ones ... it may even play the same track so often that you get sick of it. A mod like Better Music System forces it to enqueue each track in a given directory so that none are skipped; however, note that long or fragmented files might cause game stutter as the machine has to struggle to load them in time. The best method to reduce stress on the engine and hard disk is to use an optimizer that allows placing files in a directory together (consecutive), but it may take some searching to find a defragmenter with that flexibility.

2) Don't go overboard on quality. Most of Oblivion's native tracks are 128 kbps, with a smattering of 256 kbps. Adding higher quality mp3's (i.e., 320) adds to track length/load time, for little gain--you're unlikely to notice the difference ingame anyway. Reducing all added tracks to 128 can smooth out gameplay a little bit--but every little bit helps. Stripping id3 tags may also provide a fractional benefit; lyrics, et al. are just added information that the game doesn't need to know.

3) In some cases, encoding codec does matter. If you find a track that stubbornly refuses to play no matter what, look at the file Properties--mp3's encoded with some versions of lame will sometimes refuse to play, but if you re-encode using Fraunhoffer, they'll work just fine.