Limited pool of soundtrack songs?

[Lochlann]

According to the .xml audio files, each of the civilizations has dozens of songs in its soundtrack. Poland, for example, is supposed to have a pool of 40 songs during peace time: SND_EUROPE_PEACE_1 through 27, all with priority 1, and SND_EUROPE_EITHER_1 through 13, with no priority.

This a pretty large pool. Yet when I play, I invariably hear the same 6-8 tracks, over and over. This happens with all civs (that I have played), in all eras (if that matters), and it has been happening since CiV vanilla, over hundreds of hours of playtime. Very very occasionally I will hear something truly bizarre, like out of the Asia or Middle East pool (If I'm playing a European civ).

Why, out of a pool of several dozen, am I hearing the same 6-8 tracks? Has anyone else found this to be true?

 

[otaman1]

It's like putting over hundreds of songs on your playlist and shuffle play it. It's random

 

[Lochlann]

It should be random from the pool of 40 songs, yes, of course. My point is that instead of this, it is effectively random from a pool of 6-8 songs. I'm not exaggerating; I haven't heard a song outside these 6-8 tracks (from each geographical area) even once, a single time, in all my hundreds of hours of playing. I have literally no idea what ~85% of the soundtrack consists of, because I've never once heard any of those tracks.

 

[TheMarshmallowBear]

It should be random from the pool of 40 songs, yes, of course. My point is that instead of this, it is effectively random from a pool of 6-8 songs. I'm not exaggerating; I haven't heard a song outside these 6-8 tracks (from each geographical area) even once, a single time, in all my hundreds of hours of playing. I have literally no idea what ~85% of the soundtrack consists of, because I've never once heard any of those tracks.

Yea, there is something seriously weird with how music is played.

First of all, the game ends up using primarily either soundtrack, although they fixed the skipping issue, the music during war time still is affected, and beautiful songs like Field of Poppies rarely get played.

 

[Lochlann]

First of all, the game ends up using primarily either soundtrack, although they fixed the skipping issue, the music during war time still is affected, and beautiful songs like Field of Poppies rarely get played.

Hmm, is that right? I didn't know that. Interesting. Though I definitely do get a different (though still small) set of songs during wartime than during peacetime; clearly the "either" soundtrack isn't being used for both.

It should be easy enough to test, given the flexibility of the .xml files. I routinely switch between the different geographic soundtracks when I get bored with one. Like, I often play Egypt, but I quickly get sick of the Middle East tracks, so I mod the relevant .xml file to play Europe's soundtrack instead. It works fine...but again, with the same small 6-8 song subset that I get when playing an unmodded European civ. I suppose I could winnow down the .xml list to discover which soundtrack list is being played. Though that'd be pretty painstaking.

Has anyone ever made a list of the tracks, linking each reference file to a specific piece? That'd be awfully handy. Like, which files are the two halves of Copland's "Our Town" score? Those are 2 of the 6-8 I always wind up hearing.