Tutorial | How to make custom music for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Tools:

CFW tutorials:

Please ignore my awkward voice.. also this is my first time talking in a video.
Also my mic sucks

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If you are still having trouble after this tutorial then leave a comment.

[TrainiaxMKW]

This is incredible. Time to make a MK8D music pack...

[babyluigi]

Hello so I followed your tutorial. First of all, thank you very much for making this video tutorial when I had been relying on outdated hex methods to get my bgm bars working in the past. You've helped me a lot and saved me a lot of time working with BGM.bars.

However, I've discovered problems with this method when it comes to a high amount of replacements. See, I've updated my Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to like, Wave 3 with custom item support, and that's when my old bars prior to this decided to just die on me, crash on boot. I've used your method and it worked flawlessly...to a point. My game started crashing on boot when replacing some bfstps in order. At first, I thought it was maybe particular prefetches that maybe needed unique parameters but no, it turns out to be fine. This led me to discover something and it was a major pain in the ass to diagnose the problem.

BGM.bars is pretty much Goldilocks. The filesize has to be just right, and there's a min-max file size limit. As of Wave 3 custom items, update, BGM.bars filesize is 31, 805, 888 bytes, or 31, 061 kb. When replacing your bfstps from Isabelle Sound Editor in Switch Toolbox, your filesize starts to decrease. It will continue to work fine, sure, until you continue replacing and your filesize then hits 30, 177 kb, and that's when the game outright crashes on boot. And to those wondering, going over will mute the bgm of the entire game. So, I've scrambled something together and I found a solution: pad the BGM.bars with prefetches generated from an older method of how to generate them.

What I then did is replaced a good chunk of the prefetches in the vanilla game. This caused the file to lower tremendously in size (I think to like...maybe ~26, 000), but I augmented this by attaching some bigger prefetches from an older method. This caused the filesize to go back up to 30, 668 and when I used this one, game boots fine and everything plays fine, including the bigger prefetches.

Not everyone here will have the bigger prefetches backup that I do that I generated from an older method of it, but this is something I need to bring into light if someone has issues with their game booting despite following instructions here.

Edit: Okay so after fuddling around for a bit, it turns out the reason for the low file size for the bfstps is the channel amount! All Mario Kart tracks use 4 channels (first two are stereo for music, three and four are for front running beats) but in terms of audio, they're optional and you could stick with a regular brstm. HOWEVER, in terms of getting bfstps to be the proper file size so your bars doesn't decrease in file size, the amount of channels matters and helps make bigger bfstps. That was the main issue with how I did it (because 4 channel BRSTM creation is rather cumbersome) and I really hope others realize this too!

[azur]

Thanks for the easy and painless process, I got really frustrated when trying to manually edit the BGM.bars but this makes everything soooo much easier

[pikachu]

Thanks, now it plays my custom music from the beginning instead of playing the original for a few seconds. You're the best!

[nintendogametuber]

Forgot to say, make sure your song matches up with the originals Hrz in audacity!

[constant]

Thank you very much, this tutorial helped me a lot, I'm glad things are a lot more simpler now!

[SMNFXCN]

I love how we have better tools for .bars and .bfstp, all this stuff is a breeze to do now. Thank you so much for the tutorial. It's in depth and not too long. (I've seen tutorials that get dragged out for like 20 minutes for stuff like this)

[Jonas]

Thanks a lot man this is way better then the Hex Editor trash I tired many times!

[Cochu]

Thank you so much! I've been simply replacing the bfstm file and always wondered why it still played the original for a few seconds. Thank you for the tutorial
Can you explain how prefetch works or what the BARS file does? Just curious

[BaamAlex]

Okay...I experimented a bit. You don't need a modified bgm.bars on your sd. Just convert your songs and put them into the correct location on your SD.

[battlq]

Damn this tutorial is good, unfortunately I don’t have a hacked switch, but still this tutorial is really easy to follow

[A_ThingReal]

I do have a question, do you do it the same way with the battle track music ?

[ninjapizza]

if only the original soundtrack was good enough where these mods weren't necessary :( I miss old nintendo music so hard.

[shoahkhan]

Are there any other programs to covert .WAV files to .BFWAV? When I use Citric Composer (Isabelle), it always spits out an error when trying to import my custom .WAV files (character audio -> Metal Peach -> horn sound)... This, even if I convert it to another format, then back again to .WAV again... And the "MK8 Voice Porter" tool won't convert .WAV's back to .BFWAV''s (for some reason, the author removed the functionality) 😑

[jimfitzgerald]

Isabell Sound Editor always gives an error when trying to convert to bfstp

[maple]

ayo this worked and all, but how do you get the final lap of the custom song

[BloodDisc]

does it work for the actual game playing on switch or only roms?

[chilenosinvidasocial]

Guess who got all the music corrupted and only the sound effects and voices sound 🐧👍

[ManueleZ]

when i try to import modified wav with my custom song in isabelle sound editor it says an error

[Jukn]

After the update, do we need to change the version to 2.3.0?

The course with the modded music just crashes on race start.