My music folder is huge. For purpose of order, the song names include which download they are from. For example: AEternaSymphonicMusic - town_01.mp3. Some songs have longer names. Is this interfering with which songs get played. There are quite a few songs I've not heard yet while playing. Or it could be that I've not played enough to hear everything from the selection. Explore folder alone has 142 items.

That's not going to slow my game down, is it?

Oblivion's music cycling has never worked well for me either. I do get better results from using 1 or 2 dozen hand-picked songs, although I wish I knew why the sorting doesn't work. http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15970 has worked well for me in the past. Come to think of it, I can't remember why I uninstalled it.

Having an overly large data folder has been linked to stability issues, so it's probably smart to keep the number of songs relatively low. 142 songs is a lot, even 50 songs would give you 4 or so hours worth of music.

The problem is not with file names nor with a large number of music files.
Oblivion has problems playing an mp3 with tags.
For each file, open the file properties under advanced and clear out all the tag info.
Oblivion will probably stat playing those mp3 files.

Thanks, both of you. I'm using Windows XP. How do I clear out the tag information?

Right click on the song, go to properties, ID-tag -- at the bottom there's a 'clear' button that strips all that stuff out.

ID tags are part of the problem, but there are other factors that affect Oblivion's willingness to play music. These are a few I swear by (after swearing AT the game for so many years for not playing my carefully chosen music!):

1) Oblivion is lazy. Given the choice of a long track or a short one, it likes to take the easy way out--especially if the system is already laboring due to cell loading, etc. Avoid very long songs, if you can--chances are you won't hear the full track anyway with all the mudcrabs about. This goes for large bit-rates as well: the difference in quality isn't really noticeable ingame ... reducing all of your tracks to a consistent 128 kbps not only shortens file size, but actually helps smooth out gameplay stutter (minute game pauses on track load).

2) The game is prejudiced. It likes some encoding methods better than others, and sometimes refuses to play certain tracks because of it. If you've got some of these, try re-encoding them with Fraunhofer.

3) Keep your game optimized. Again, Oblivion is lazy--it'll go back to playing the same song over and over if it's in a hurry, and the track is easily accessible. If you have a disk optimizer that will put all the files in a directory together--and on the fastest part of the platter--so much the better. Unfortunately, not many current hard disk optimizers have this degree of control. Google Ultimate Defrag, and it'll tell you everything you never wanted to know.

4) Since you're running the game on XP, you might try Better Music System to give Ob a kick in the pants (if you aren't already using it). From what I've heard, the DLL it relies on doesn't work well on Vista/Win7--and sometimes even disagrees with certain XP setups. But if you're one of the lucky ones like me that it works well for, BMS is a must-have, and a blessing.

PS. 142 tracks is not a lot. :biggrin:

Ooh, thanks aellis and daemondarque. This is really useful info.

I use XP as well, but clearing the tags on my system is different than what demondarque says.

Right click on the mp3 file.
Click on the Summary tab.
Click and the Advanced button.
Delete any entries that may be listed.
Click OK, go to the next file.

demondarque is quite right about the file size.
Download Audacity (free), and convert all the mp3's to 128kbps or to 192kbps (Oblivion default) with a sample rate of 44kHz.

And lastly, the DLL he is refering to is http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=19772.
I was one of the lucky ones. It worked flawlessly for me until I updated to OBSE 20. I still haven't had a chance to confirm if the new OBSE is in fact casuing issues with EMC, but I thought I'd mention it. EMC can be used as a stand-alone "out-of-the-box" without Better Music System if your esp slots are tight or you don't want to dike around with setting it up.

I am an avid "modded" music user, and make it an attempt to add music to my Oblivion Music folder from other games and sources (it is very large at the moment - how large? I'll have to go back and check). 4.5 GB is the folder size...

That said, Better Music System always hung (not crashed) on me if I tried to use it - and I tried multiple times. Finally, after cleaning the the mp3 tags, I was able to use BMS (And I love it!). So I would recommend cleaning your mod-added music and also trying BMS after that. ALso download the 109 music tracks to go with BMS that some helpful soul uploaded on Nexus

http://www.softpointer.com/tr.htm will let you remove tags much faster then doing it one at a time.

You sure about this tag thing? The vanilla mp3 files all have tag info on them.

I, for one, have never heard of the problem before and can't imagine how tags could possibly affect anything. Tag&Rename is still useful for organizing your music library :shrug:

Not sure.
Just noticed that some files didn't play.
Saw somewhere in a thread to try removing the tags.
Did and the files played. Though it may have had something to do with re-encoding as well.

Vanilla music files have tag info?
Not on mine (maybe I removed them, it's been a long time).

I just checked a few of my vanilla files. For whatever it's worth I didn't find any tag info. *shrugs*