Tutorial: Minecraft Sound Modding

Replacing the sounds or music in Minecraft is relatively simple. First you should navigate to the folder where Minecraft stores its sound files.

MAC:

/Users/~Library/Application Support/minecraft/resources

Windows:

C:\Users\[insertuser]\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\resources

The majority of the sound files are in the folder “newsound” and the music files in “newmusic” All the audio is (as far as I know) 16 bit 44.1kHz .ogg files. Predictably, the music files are in stereo and all the sfx are in mono. To swap these sounds we basically will just be overwriting them. I would recommend starting by backing up all the files you will be overwriting.

Create a folder that will contain your soundbanks. It doesn’t really matter where you put it. Take the first sound that you want to replace and reproduce its folder tree into your soundbank folder (example: copy resources/newsound/liquid). Export your replacement sound to this folder as an .ogg at 16 bit 44.1k and give it the same name as the original sound. Repeat this process for every sound you want to replace. When you are ready, just merge your soundbank with the resources directory. If it worked correctly it will ask you if you want to overwrite some files.

Now, to prevent Minecraft from overwriting these files every time you restart the game, you need to download and install epinull’s Sound Mod Enabler or crazyputje’s Sound Mod Enabler depending on which one is up to date with Minecraft.

Be aware that every official update to Minecraft completely breaks the sound mod so you either have to stick with the default sounds until a new version of the sound mod is released, or copy files into the resources directory after the game is already running (this requires you to do it every time you start up the game).

Good luck, and let me know if you run into any problems.