[ZM] [GMI] Unexplained Audio Issue

[TheLucidGamer]

I'm fairly new to the MZM modding scene and was doing some Audio replacement/importing to have different tracks play in areas like Brinstar or Norfair, just to test what a modified soundtrack would sound like. I just finished replacing Brinstar Vanilla with the Overgrown Brinstar from Super Metroid (I followed the GMI Read-Me as closely as I could, from the 13379 sample rate to the Mono tracked, Headerless 8-bit PCM RAW output), and it worked. It's playing the Super Brinstar audio back relatively well, save for what sounds like a dead note or two that plays as an airy static every minute or so.

But when I went to go about regular gameplay, I noticed something off. Whenever I fire my regular beam now, the Music for Brinstar restarts. I gave it a few shots, and each press of the B button just restarts the track.

Did I somehow break something with my edit? Maybe a weirdly checked Hex that I didn't take into account? I saw that regular sound effects are also changeable through GMI. Should I use GMI to reassign the Normal Shot sound to fix it?

(EDIT - I was able to record the instance in question and was able to upload a video showing what is happening: https://youtu.be/oJHSJn10HpI )

[TobiMikami]

Did you overwrite something? My first thought would be whatever you changed overwrote the sound at its location or something involved with it. Music isn't exactly the most well documented thing out here and especially not with the GBA games.

[TheLucidGamer]

Did you overwrite something? My first thought would be whatever you changed overwrote the sound at its location or something involved with it. Music isn't exactly the most well documented thing out here and especially not with the GBA games.

Thank you for the reply. Luckily, I was able to fix the issue with a brief experiment on a different rom:

At first, I applied the same Brinstar music alteration as I had before, only to find that there was no looping feedback on the clean rom. To see if my hunch was right, I also copied over the Brinstar track to the Short Shot Beam effect, seeing if it replicated the effect as documented in the video. Sure enough it did, and even overwrote the music the same way as in the video. So naturally I had assumed I somehow ended up shifting the selector from the music to sound effects, maybe from an errant/unaware keyboard press. Mystery solved on that front.

But I also noticed something else that made me curious. The Priority for Brinstars music and the Beam Shot was the same. They even took up the same song group in GMI's Interface. Logically, this seemed to be strange, so after doing some downloading, editing, and exporting of audio for insertion into the editor, and replacing the Shot sound with an alternative sound to test if it indeed broke things the way I thought, I found that the Priority and Grouping being on the same level as Brinstar is what is telling the game to overwrite the music with the Beam Fire sound, which at first was just Brinstar again.

With that out of the way, I decided to test if changing the priority to something out of the way would fix the music overwrite. So I gave the Normal Beam Shot the same Priority/Group as its neighbor, the Long Beam Shot. Ran everything through, tested it out, and it worked great. Even fired up MAGE to do a full inventory test, and it worked fine without breaking the Long Beam Shot sound.

>>In short, I was able to fix the problem, while also finding a work around for a second issue I hadn't even considered until testing what I could have done wrong. Definitely an interesting string of events with my rookie mistake, but ultimately insightful. I'll be sure to document any more issues/fixes should they arise, if at least so anyone else having trouble can gleam something that could help them with their own projects.

[FelixWright]

Documenting your findings is much appreciated, thank you for this. Will keep this in mind when I use GMI.