Music System Guide

One of the innovative parts of LOTRO is the in-game music system.  The game allows you the ability to play music through 2 different mechanisms.

1) Pre-programmed midi-type files, written by users

2) Playing “live” music while in game.

From what I’ve seen so far, the most popular use of the music system is to use pre-programmed music files.  It’s a great way to pass the time while waiting for a group to form, or to put on a little show while in town crafting, or doing your duty at the auction house.

Lotro uses .ABC files to play back music while in game.  These files are like a cross between text and midi files.  The best resource I’ve found online for in game music is at The Fat Lute (which wins the hilarious-URL-of-the-day prize of a LOTRO Reporter tea cozy*).  There you can get great gobs of music, searchable by artist or song title.  Some of these songs are marvelous recreations while others are barely recognizable.  You’ll have to try them out to see how well they play in-game.  There’s a very in-depth tutorial on how to copy and/or create these music files, as well as a description of how these files work at http://www.thefatlute.com/Tutorial.aspx, but it can be broken down to a few easy steps.

1) Search for and open the song you like at The Fat Lute

2) Copy the text of the song to your clipboard

3) Create a new text file in your documents folder under The Lord of the Rings Online\music (usually this is the My Documents folder in Windows XP or the Documents folders in Vista).

4) Paste the contents of the file into the text file you just created.

5) Save As or rename the file to <whatever you want>.ABC (e.g. stillalive.abc)

Once you are in game, you can type /music to pull out your instrument (I can hear you tittering out there.  Hey – stop that!) and then type /play <filename> to start playing your song!  E.g. /play stillalive

Now you are rocking like it’s 1999!

Now some of you might be asking, “Is this legal?  Are there copyright issues?”.  I was wondering the same thing.  I found a great forum post on the lotro main forums by PugPug that gives a Coles-notes breakdown of copyright as it applies to playing songs in game.

Now if you’re wanting to learn to play music live and on the fly, man you are barking up the wrong tree.  I have a hard enough time dealing with 4 or 5 notes in Rock Band.  That said, the best I can offer is to type /music which will make the following scales available to you (from http://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Music):

*Note: Tea Cozy is 100% imaginary.  Any colour you want to imagine is available.  Typical imaginary shipping times are 3 to 400 rotations around the sun.