Grabbed BG1 and 2 during the sale and I've encountered a strange problem: The background music for most areas in BG2 hardly ever play. Everywhere I've been so far (the starting dungeon, the Promenade, the Slums, the sewers), I'll go for as long as 20 or 30 minutes before the music plays once, but it doesn't loop the track again for a long time. Music on the main menu and battle music work without issue - it's just background music.

I have a few mods installed but I don't think they're the problem. While troubleshooting I made a fresh BG2 install, with absolutely nothing extra added, and still had the same problem with the music hardly ever playing (but it did seem to play a little more frequently). BG1 on Tutu, however, worked just fine. I'm on Windows 7 and I installed to a directory outside Program Files, as the guides suggested. Any idea what could be causing this?

Or, if I'm just a moron and the music is supposed to play infrequently, let me know.

Background music in BG2 doesn't loop all the time. It also often has fairly large sections of empty space in the background music files themselves, which makes it seem even sparser. Why it's done that way I have no idea, but it works the exact same way in my retail BG2 copy and my GOG copy. I suppose it's possible that it's a bug, but it's the same on both of my versions. The ambient sounds (fishmongers, dungeon sounds, etc) all seem play pretty frequently, but the only area that plays background music consistently for me is Brynnlaw.

That's very odd that they would program the music to behave that way. From what little I've heard of it, the BGM is beautiful, and I don't see why they would want to make it scarce.

Is there a mod or tweak that can change the music to play more frequently, by any chance?

I agree that playing a piece of music on loop is the way to make you sick of it.
That every time combat starts the background music gets interrupted doesn't help either.

I wish there was a way to disable that infernal combat track. I always play with music turned off completely because of it.

I heartily agree that repeating music too often will make you sick of it - Morrowind's beautiful orchestral main theme comes to mind, as mentioned above. However, I do think they went a little too far making it this infrequent, but that's just me.

Since this is normal game behavior I'll go ahead and close this question.

However, if anyone in the future has my same concern, I do recommend using 1pp's High Quality Music Mod ( http://www.shsforums.net/topic/50032-1pp-high-quality-music-for-soatob-tututosc-iwd-pst/ ), which raises the playback quality of in-game music to 44.1kHz. It also seems to make the music play slightly more often, but again, that might just be me.

Have barely gotten out of the starting location yet, and am already sick to death of the combat music. Wish there was an easy way to remove it without stunting the rest. IIRC there was a post over at the BG:EE site about it, where some chap said we could delete/remove/rename the folders starting with "B" in the music folder. Maybe I'll try that later and hope nothing gets mucked up. It's quite annoying by default.

Edit: Found it: http://forum.baldursgate.com/discussion/3750/sound-options-separate-sliders-for-battle-music-and-ambient-music

I agree, the area music in BG2 is way too infrequent. I took a look with Near Infinity at the music files, and apparently there are large sections of "silent music" that gets played in most areas.

So what I did was replace the silent sound file with one that's much shorter in length. This was done using PS Gui, acm2wav, wav2acm, and Audacity.

Here's the file if you want it:

www.dropbox.com/s/7pv8hl7vhlrh7nf/SPC1.acm

Just drop it into your BG2 - shadows of amn/music directory, and replace the existing file. :)

WARNING: You might get sick of the music if it loops too often, haha.