Adding custom songs and radio stations - Everything you need to know

This guide has video and text instructions on how to find and use live streaming radio links so you can go space truckin' across the west coast. My completed live_streams.sii file is also available to download.

Video Guide

Helpful Links

Steam sometimes removes links, if any are missing/broken please check my site or the video description on Youtube: it'll have all links and be up to date

http://www.shoutcast.com/Home
http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/mp3.asp

https://notepad-plus-plus.org/

My custom radio file and the downloadable transcript:
http://localcontent.weebly.com/videos/american-truck-simulator-dj-everything-to-know-about-adding-your-own-music

The Truck Sim subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TruckSim/

Text Guide

This section is my closed caption transcript for the above video. The video is easier to follow because you can see the exact changes in the live_streams file code but some people prefer text/ have audio disabilities so here's the option.

American Truck Simulator comes out tomorrow and if you want to fully enjoy the experience of space truckin’ along the west coast you’ll probably want to listen to your own music and radio stations on the in cab radio. I’m going to go through and show you how to do it.

For adding your own mp3s you’ll need to get up the “American Truck Simulator” folder that is in your Documents and open the “Music” folder, this’ll be empty if you’ve just installed the game. Copy any music you want to play here. Normally you can save the trouble of locating the files by going to your media player and dragging the files from here, most should support whole playlist copying and you’ll need a whole bunch of tracks to last for the cross-state delivery routes.
Unfortunately GTA 5 this isn’t and the in-game CD player has next to no features - Your tracks will play in the order you put them there, without shuffling and always in the same order. If you play on gamepad you probably won’t even have any free buttons to bind to skip track, you have to back right out of the game into the main menu and skip tracks there.

Because of this it’s better to find an internet radio station you enjoy and add that to the game, something that’s basically the opposite of a simple experience: back in the same “American Truck Simulator” folder you’ll find a file called live_streams.sii. This is what you’ll have to edit to add your own radio stations.

For this you’ll need a text editor such as notepad++. The built in windows notepad will work but it makes an already tedious process more frustrating. Links for the free download will be in the description. When you open the live streams file you’ll see a list of streaming links you’ll have to add onto. The tricky part is finding the direct streaming links for your radio stations: the normal links you would use to listen don’t work and all the truck sim games only support mp3, mss and direct IP links. To get these I recommend using http://www.shoutcast.com/ and searching for the stations you listen to. Click the download option and select either of the top 2 options. The site’s missing several common ones and seemingly all BBC stations so for UK radio http://www.radiofeeds.co.uk/mp3.asp works the same way except you click the 128k stereo button. This will download a playlist file which, unfortunately, the game cannot read.
Open up this file in notepad and copy the link, this is what you’ll add to the live stream list. Change the top “stream_Data” line to one more than your new number of streams, and paste your link in-between the bottom Stream_Data entry and the }(curled) bracket below it. Copy the prefix from the line above (making sure to update the stream number) and then copy the suffix and place it after your new entry.

You can now update the info that will be shown in game (separated by the straight lines) these are Station name, Music Genre, bit-rate, and favourite. Leave the last field set as 0, you can favourite and organise the list easier in-game. Now save the file and you’re done.
You have to do this with every station you want to add so I’ll include a download of the file with my radio stations already added, though they might not be to your taste.

If you boot up the game you can now find the new station and music added into the radio and ready for you to listen to. Tune in from the pause menu and you can feel free to enjoy the Mad Max concept album as you deliver toilets across the state.

Conclusion

Have any questions then feel free to ask, if this guide helped you please do all the social media-ey stuff and such with the video. I highly recommend Triple J (Australian station) as a radio station to add and the following albums for driving music.

• Clutch - Psychic Warfare
  
• Occams Laser - The Road to Fury
  
• Amorphis - Skyforger

[GoVetter]

FYI. I found it. (I forgot it.) Documents, then it's 'live_streams(dot)sii' .. Then edit properly. THX!

[GoVetter]

Previously, on American Truck Simulator... (lol)
I easily had 2 channels on my radio.
Sky Blue Radio http://streaming.radio.co/s7198d9355/listen
Radio Ultra http://nashe2.hostingradio.ru:80/ultra-128.mp3

Before, editing the *.sii file was easy enough. lol But, now I can't find it! Did an Update change the Radio *.sii file somehow? Where is it?

[JustAHillbilly777]

Do .mp3 files work with ATS? And if so how does one go about installing them properly?

[Goatroach]

Yeah, certain album tracks won't play, even if the songs are in the root music folder. I think I'll just mute game music and run my iTunes playlist in the background. At least that way I get all songs, plus they can be shuffled. Too bad shuffle isn't random like old-school pre-2005 iTunes. Now it favors songs with more play counts instead of a truly random shuffle. I actually have to reset play counts in a playlist of about 200 songs so I don't hear the same 10 songs over and over in the same hour. Still, it beats no shuffle feature.

[Cozzie]

MP3 should work fine but put them all in the root folder and see if that works. I've been getting a few comments in the past couple days saying it doesn't work right all of a sudden so it could be a bad update has caused problems, but I haven't played the game in a long time so I don't know for sure.

The only workaround for the lack of shuffle people have come up with is a batch file [www.gamefaqs.com] which randomly renames all the music files each time the game runs, but the devs don't seem to have any intention to put it in properly, for some reason.

[Goatroach]

What format can the music be in? I copied and pasted my GTA V music list (all work ingame) right into ATS, but it seems half the songs get skipped. Since it's from my GTA folder, they're all .mp3 conversions from my iTunes library (GTA doesn't support iTunes' .m4a format).
Any idea why it's buggy? GTA V allows sub folders in the music directory (music>artist>album>songexample.mp3), but does ATS? I'm going to bring all of the songs into the root music folder for ATS and see if that helps. No shuffle feature really is bad. Maybe there's a mod (I just bought the game during the summer sale).

Any help would be appreciated.