Looking for ways to mod music

[Jon]

I recently tried changing the game's music files, and things were going pretty smoothly:

- extracted the bgm file and got the .hca files inside
- converted .hca to .wav, all files play normally
- switched two .hca files around, they play normally ingame

but when I try to convert a .wav file downloaded from the internet to .hca using vgaudio, the audio inside the game becomes unrecognizable and highly distorted. I tried many different .wav files and sample rates / conversion methods, but in the end they all become corrupted.

the .hca files converted from .wav can be played perfectly by players able to read .hca, but the game still bugs out. As far as I know CS&HM use Criware's audio file formats, and the issues seem to happen during the wav >> hca conversion, since unpacking then repacking the game's own audio files still plays them normally.

Is there a proper tool I should be using? I figured I could try using tools released for other games released in 2015 that use criware's audio systems, like maybe Dragon Ball Xenoverse. What do I do?

[Syd Montague]

Gonna document what we found in the modding Discord here as well:

The key (heh) problem was the lack of encryption, that the audio files expect. For that using a newer vgaudio version than the one released on GitHub is necessary.

It has to be fed the encryption key for DSCS, resulting in a command like this:

VGAudioCli.exe -i input.wav -o output.hca --out-format hca --keycode 2897314143465725881

[kripcision]

interesting, when i played on the switch i just turned off the music because its terrible lol, but if someone had a good soundtrack to use i would totally use that instead