Custom Music in The Sims 4

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One of the lesser-known feature of The Sims 4 (TS4) is the ability to import custom music in the form of MP3s ≤ 320 kbps by placing them in %USERPROFILE%\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\Custom Music\<Genre>\.

This functionality can be expanded upon via the musical swiss-army-knife MusicBee, allowing the automatic conversion of a randomized selection of music.

Adding Virtual Devices https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/Devices#Preferences

Synchronizing specific selections (I synchronize a playlist) https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/Devices#What_to_Sync

Creating automatic playlists https://musicbee.fandom.com/wiki/Playlists#Auto-Playlists

To more specifically explain what I’m doing:

Virtual Devices

I have a virtual device pointed at …\Documents\Electronic Arts\The Sims 4\Custom Music\Metal\, which does the following:

Stores music files as <Album Artist> - <Title>

Converts files to MP3 (unless they already are, and are ⇐ 320kbps)

Does not copy artwork (not really important, but cuts down on wasted space, as TS4 doesn’t use it)

There’s a automatic playlist that selects 64 random tracks (the number of tracks seems to impact loading time, but I haven’t tested this extensively so YMMV [I also have a huge number of mods loading]) meeting the following criteria:

Genre: is any of: (select list of desired genres)

Last Played: has a value

When I want to update the music in the game, I synchronize the virtual device (MusicBee re-selects the playlist every time you do this).

Notes:

The criteria for the auto-playlist can be extensively tweaked to your liking.

If you really wanted to, you could mirror this process for every genre, but in the interest of disk space and sanity, I’d limit it to a couple that you use frequently and/or have a lot of music for. Most of my sims are metalheads, so… 😉

Caveat

The music in-game is probably going to be a different volume than the vanilla radio. Setting on-the-fly conversion: level volume: tracks at the same volume in the virtual device’s Settings should help keep things uniform, but it won’t help with your music being different from vanilla. The first thing that comes to mind is using FFMPEG to bump the volume. See Bulk Volume Change.