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Wave to XWM Guide

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Category: The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim Modding Guides

Last Updated on Monday, 05 March 2012 16:31

Written by Giskard

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Wave to XWM

Skyrim modders and from what I found whilst googling this issue, other modders for other games are having problems converting their audio in to XWM file (also called the XWMA file format). Which is a variation on the WMA file format windows media player uses.

Several games use Xwma (or XWM for short) audio files, but all of them appear to be console games. PC at the time of writing has little or NO support for this format outside of the Microsoft Direct X SDK and even then the solution involves a Microsoft DOS command not a app or a proper shell command as you might expect in this age of Windows 7 and 64 bit computers and electricity.

Thankfully Doombuggie and Euther found out what was needed to make converting waves to XWMs a painless experience and I slapped together this document to help those suck in the same boat we were stuck in.

Thank you guys.

For copyright reasons I cannot share the required "xWMAEncode.exe" file with you directly, but I can tell you where to get it. Always remember to check for newer versions of these distributions. The bold type above the links is the name to search for. At the time of writing (March 2012), these are the current versions.

Requirements

Microsoft's Directx SDK

Directx SDK (June 2010)

The actual file you need from that 500meg download is the "xWMAEncode.exe" and it needs the Visual C++ Runtime Libraries to work, see the link below.

Microsofts Visual C++ Runtime Libraries

Visual C++ Runtime Libraries 32bit (Dec 2010)
Visual C++ Runtime Libraries 64bit (Dec 2010)

Download Wave2XWM archive

Download the Wave2XWM archive from us here at the guild. This contains the bat file you need, or you can create this file using the instructions found at the end of this doc.

Setting things up.

Install the Microsoft DirectX SDK and the correct Visual C++ Runtimes for your system, if you do not know which runtime is right for you. Go to My Computer (or just Computer on the Windows 7 start menu) and right click on it and select properties. You will get a window up giving information that should contain something about the OS you are using, be it 32 or 64 bit.

Open up the Wave2Xma archive and you will see a folder has been packed in to it containing the bat file you need, just drag this folder to where you want to convert your files. Or make a folder of your own and drag and drop just the bat file in to that.

Now Skip to the Usage instructions, and come back to this point if nothing happens.

If you follow the usage instructions below and nothing happens, you need to move the xWMAEncode.exe in to the same folder as the bat file we provided. Search for it using windows and copy it to the folder.

Any exe in the system path will work from any location under dos, but an exe outside of the system path has to be run from the folder its stored in or moved to the system path. Hence the reason for making a copy in the folder containing the bat file.

Usage

Just copy all your wave files to the folder and click on the bat file to run it, it will convert ALL the waves to xwm in seconds for you. Also note that xWMAEncode.exe command does a lot more than just converting waves, so if you read the docs for it you may be able to adapt this to support other formats used by other games.

What's in the bat file ?

Well this one line.

for /r . %%T IN (*.wav) do @xWMAEncode.exe "%%T" "%%~pT%%~nT.xwm"

To make it, copy that to an ordinary txt file, save it and then change the extension from txt to bat and you have a bat file. This only works on normal txt files btw.

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