Now that an official "high quality"-patch for the music of "Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords" has been released, you're finally able to create and burn yourself a nice CD of the great soundtrack Mark Griskey composed for the game. Just like Jeremy Soule, who composed the soundtrack for the first "KotOR"-game, Griskey managed to give the Star Wars universe an epic sound, which keeps in tone with John Williams' compositions for the original movies, yet offers a unique and fresh feel to it. And now, without further ado, let's get started with the soundtrack...

In order to follow this tutorial, you'll need some tools installed:

• The Miles Sound Tools
• The RAD Video Tools
• WinLAME (for MP3-encoding... of course you can use any other encoder as well)

Furthermore you'll need:

• KotOR II - HQ music patch (148 MB)

And if you don't own the game (since you need two of the cutscene files):

• KotOR II - HQ movie patch [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] (195 MB each... sorry)

You'll notice that these patches require a lot of HD-space, plus we're working with uncompressed audio later on, so you should have at least 5 GB of free disk space.

Go into the StreamMusic sub-folder and delete all of the files, except for these ones:

Now we need to convert the files from their Miles-compression into uncompressed WAV-files.

To do this start up the Miles Sound Studio from your Miles Sound Tools-group in the start menu. Navigate to the StreamMusic folder, select the first file and click on Decompress. Unfortunately you can't select all of the files at once and decompress all of them with one click, therefore you'll have to do this for each file (just press ENTER when the file-name dialog pops up... the tool will add a New_ in front of each file name automatically).

When all files are decompressed, you can delete the old files (the ones without New_ in front of them).

Now, on to some renaming-frenzy (keep the .wav extension):

Note that these track-names are partially taken from the game's music player, and partially made up by me. Most of them should fit to the according place in the story as depicted in their corresponding track-title, although some of them were used in different parts of the game as well, and so there might be errors. Nevertheless, this is the track-listing that makes sense for me, and I've tried to alternate between ambience and battle cues to "enhance the listening experience", as pros tend to call it nowadays. Plus, it's the track-listing I've used on my back cover, so you'll have no choice anyway.

You might have noticed that, according to the numbering, some tracks are still missing, so now we'll deal with those.

If you have the game installed, you can find the first track in the Launcher sub-folder inside the game's directory. Copy the file background.wav to our work folder, and rename it to 01 - Startup Screen.wav

If you don't have the game, or are too lazy, you can get the track HERE (which is already MP3ified).

The second track is supposed to be the Star Wars main theme. Of course you can use your favourite version of the theme here, but since it's the KotOR II-soundtrack, you might want to use the version played in the game's opening movie. So now we'll have to extract the audio from some of the game's cutscenes.

Start up the RAD Video Tools found in the Bink and Smacker-group in your start menu, and navigate to your Movies folder (either inside your game directory, or in the folder the movie-patch has created). Select the file PerMov01.bik and click on the Convert a file button. When asked if you want to treat the numbered files as a single animation choose No.

A window pops up in which you make sure that Convert video is unchecked, wheras Convert audio must be checked, and all numeric fields in the audio-area left blank. Browse... the output file to be created inside your work folder, and name the file 02 - Main Theme.wav. Hit the Convert button, and after a few seconds the file got decompressed into a WAV-file. (You might want to use a sound-editing tool to trim the "A long time ago..."-silence from the beginning of the track, but I'll leave that up to you)

While we're at it we'll repeat this procedure for the Credits.bik, which, as the name suggest, contains a beautiful closing-medley of the different themes used in the game. Name this file 51 - End Credits.wav.

Okay, almost done, there's just one last track missing. We can get this one from Mark Griskey's very own homepage:

Jek Jek Tarr Battle.mp3

Put this file into your work folder as well and rename it to 25 - Jek'Jek Tarr Tunnels.mp3

We're basically finished. You might want to convert all .wav files into the MP3-format (using Lame or whatever encoder you like), or some other audio format, to save disk space.

Then burn them to a CD, and print out the covers below.

Enjoy!