Unreal Tournament music won't work after UTamp 1.80

[Ironword300]

I'm hoping I can get some help on restoring normal UT music behavior on my system, as it no longer works after mod UTamp got hold of it. Otherwise I'm going to have to redo three or four hours' worth of reinstalling & reconfiguring various mods & bots (models/skins) when I recopy my backup clean-install UT folder.
All UT99 users be warned: UTamp 1.80 utterly hoses your UT music. To be fair, the mod is old (vintage 2000) and it might have worked as intended w/earlier versions of UT, but now that we've all long since gotten 436, everyone should stay away from this music mod. It is unfortunately still available at one or two download sites, and there's no warning about the damage it will inflict on your UT install. The mod is supposed to give you total control over UT music without sacrificing normal UT music behavior. However, the mod actually does the opposite, destroying the normal behavior (normal UT music doesn't work anymore) while simultaneously failing to replace it with anything worthwhile.

Here are the details: the interface claims playlist functionality but does not deliver on the promise (the playlist doesn't cycle). The readme also says, "Ability to use the default Map Music: Check the appropriate box in the UI and the music track assigned to the map will be played when the level loads." This is also untrue. Yes, the mod menu does offer the checkbox as described; but it doesn't work. Instead, the mod sets your UT to a single selection (this is the only thing that works--you can at least select this one single song). This selection overrides whatever the mapper specified, completely ignoring the aforementioned checkbox even if it is checked, so that single selection plays over and over, forever and ever without end. All you can do is select another song, and then that one becomes the one and only.

But the worst thing about the mod is not that it doesn't work. Much worse is that it makes its broken behavior permanent--uninstalling it does not bring back normal music! At first I thought the solution was to replace UnrealTournament.ini. Apparently at least part of the change is made there: after deleting all the install files, then removing all mentions of UTamp in Manifest.ini, then looking through User.ini and not finding any setting that looked relevant, I did the same, w/same result, in UnrealTournament.ini. Then replaced UnrealTournament.exe and tested. No dice. But then as last-ditch effort I replaced UnrealTournament.ini and, woohoo, had default map music back again. Yay! So UnrealTournament.ini must have something to do with the problem, though I didn't find any music-related settings there that had anything to do with UTamp. And ultimately it didn't matter anyway. Once I shut down again and came back the next day, my poor UT was right back to the mutator's override behavior. Somewhere very deep in the innards of the UT install--and not dependent upon any of its own files--this mutator lives up to the name and really screws with the DNA of the game's body.

So I'm at the point of being forced to go back to an old pre-mutator install to get music back completely, which of course will mean that I'll have to reinstall and reconfigure a number of other mutators (good ones that actually work). AVOID THIS MUTATOR LIKE THE PLAGUE! And anyone have any ideas on where exactly this mutator hid its nasty permanent settings? Of course I've long since deleted all of its files.

TIA, and lots of it, for a solution that works!

 

[NeoNite]

I''ve always used modplugplayer. Never had any trouble with it.

 

[Ironword300]

Thx for the reco. And guess what? when I checked it out, obviously I discovered that it's not a UT mod but works with all sorts of other games and formats. And I thought, well, if it can do that, maybe VLC, which I already have and which works with tons of formats too, might also support umx. So I dragged a umx file over to VLC and ta-da, it worked!

As no-one seems to have any specific ideas regarding what UTamp may have done to make its broken behavior permanent, I'll try to do the in-place reinstall recommended by gopostal in post https://forums.beyondunreal.com/thr...-install-into-new-system.204660/#post-2621279 . Seems to me that what's going on in my system is similar to the core-file corruption he describes there, so his solution ought to apply.

 

[Ironword300]

Mea culpa!

After further experimentation, it turns out that the problematic behavior was NOT being caused by UTamp but rather by Oldskool. In the Oldskool menu there's an option to use CD music. Either that comes checked by default upon installation, or I checked it by accident during my big mass-mod session when I installed a bunch of mods and configured them all at the same time in one long weekend afternoon.

At any rate, unchecking that Oldskool option made everything return to normal. The reason I thought it was UTamp is because UTamp overrode whatever Oldskool was doing to the extent that, despite Oldskool, UTamp would replace the one single song that Oldskool was allowing to play. But Oldskool still restricted everything else. That's the reason I thought UTamp made the problem permanent even after being uninstalled--I took out UTamp, but the problem was actually being caused by Oldskool, so of course it was still occurring.

So I need to make it clear that I was blaming UTamp unfairly. I still don't know how well it works because taking it out was the first thing I did, and I haven't reinstalled it. Just want to make it clear that it doesn't look like it was the culprit for the problem I described in the original post.