Add exploration & town music from Oblivion to Skyrim's tracklists. I grew up playing Morrowind and Oblivion so naturally I'm pretty attached to their soundtracks. I mostly play Skyrim because the atmospheric exploration puts me in a good mood, so I've always wanted to play Skyrim with Oblivion music thrown into the mix. But surprisingly I couldn't find any existing mods that do this. Due to Bethesda's license, technically nobody can distribute a Skyrim mod containing Oblivion assets, but you can still copy the music from Oblivion and download a plugin to integrate it. So that's what I did, and you can do the same thing if you have Oblivion.

This mod only includes an ESL-flagged ESP. On its own it will do nothing, since it doesn't include the assets it depends on. You need to install Oblivion and copy the files from Oblivion\Data\Music into your workspace. Before installing them, you also need to convert them to xwm. Technically you can convert them to wav, but they are already compressed mp3s (192kbps, 44.1kHz) so there's really no point. Since the plugin is written assuming filepaths ending in .xwm, I think you might need to modify the track records if you use wav. And from what I've heard, the volume for wav files may be inconsistent for some users. So let's encode the files with xwm, and I recommend Skyrim Audio Converter since it'll let you match the original bitrate.

Installation:
In the Skyrim Audio Converter folder, open the ini file. Change Bitrate to 6 and xwmBitrate to 5. Then open Skyrim Audio Converter and drag all the files in Explore and Public into the audio converter window. Set the bitrate to 192k and hit convert, outputting to the same folder they came from. Now make sure that the .xwm files are the same size as the .mp3 files (slightly larger actually). If they're smaller than the mp3s, go back and make sure your ini bitrate settings are maxed out.

Once you've done this, delete all the .mp3 files. So you should be left with a folder "Music" which contains "Explore" and "Public" each with their own tracks. Leave the track names as they are, but make a new folder in "Music" called tes4-aminomancer. Drag "Explore" and "Public" into it. So the path should now be Music\tes4-aminomancer\... Now, if you use a mod manager and want the music and the plugin to be contained within a single mod, extract my mod and put the ESP file into your workspace, select everything and use 7-zip to "add to archive," zip it up using the default settings, and install it with your mod manager. If you want to install it separately then just zip up the Music folder. If you installed everything correctly, you should be able to find Data\Music\tes4-aminomancer\explore and Data\Music\tes4-aminomancer\public, and there should be tracks in each of those folders.

Details:
The dungeon, combat, and special tracks are not included. Skyrim's dungeon volume balancing is a little different from Oblivion's, so I just didn't want to mess with it for my own game. Oblivion's combat tracks do not have finale tracks, so using the combat tracks can cause jarring audio transitions when combat ends. As for the special tracks, I considered replacing the intro music, but I couldn't find any way to do this with a plugin, and it seemed outside the scope of this mod.

In terms of placement and conditions I think you'll like my choices. Each track from Oblivion has a pretty distinct mood, so anyone can clearly tell which times and weather conditions work for a song. Town songs each play at different times of day, and exploration songs are distributed by location and weather, and filtered out based on conditions. So songs that are too upbeat to play at night are disabled by time conditions, while also never entering rotation for snowy areas. And songs that are too downbeat to play during a sunny afternoon follow the same kind of pattern. Since I intended this for my own playthrough, I was aiming for a "vanilla plus" experience, so I went pretty light on the oblivion tracks. I also included additional silent patches to compensate for the non-silent tracks I added. This mod doesn't replace anything, it merely adds songs into the 'playlists.'

Compatibility:
Since this mod changes music type records, it will require a patch to work with any other mod that adds music tracks to the vanilla playlists. Whichever plugin loads last will win. Fortunately I think these records can be bashed, or if not they can easily be patched by hand. If you don't know anything about using xEdit for patching, there are lots of videos about it on youtube. But it's really easy: simply load all your mods in xEdit, then focus my mod. Right click the first music type record and hit "Add as override into..." and make a new plugin. You'll want to do this with every music type record, while dragging all the conflicting records from your other music mods into the corresponding cells under your new plugin. So where each individual mod has some empty cells, your new plugin's column should look like a combination of all the other mods, containing all of their records. Then just exit and save. Don't forget to enable this new plugin in your mod manager.

This mod only affects vanilla music type records — those added in Skyrim and its DLCs. Other DLC-sized mods which add music types (e.g. Beyond Skyrim - Bruma, The Forgotten City, etc.) will probably not start playing Oblivion music. That will only happen if they add cells which use vanilla music types. It's easy to add the Oblivion tracks to these DLC playlists, I just chose not to because it would mean adding mods as masters, which means you could only use this mod if you use exactly the same quest mods I use. Personally I prefer not to mess with mods' music anyway. Their authors curated the music for their intended experience, so adding Oblivion music seems a bit hamfisted. But if you want to, find the music type records for the quest mod and pick a playlist you want to add to. Copy it as an override into a new plugin, (it'll ask if adding a master is ok, say yes) then right click the tracks cell for your new plugin, and click "Add" however many times. Then double click the new records and enter the editorID of the track you want to add to the playlist. Pretty simple.

I haven't tested this mod much since it's so basic, so lmk if there are any problems I missed.