Is there any way to get the redbook audio / cd music to repeat itself after a track is played? It's better than the midi music but it only plays once, then stops. Especially annoying in combat, because the combat music is very short, and clearly meant to be looped.

I remember a *LONG* time ago, I contacted Sierra through direct email and asked for this exact feature request.
BaK was out for a while by then, patches were a rare commodity and Dynamix's interest in the project was done I'm certain.
However a helpful Sierra customer service rep did respond personally and said that it was probably not going to happen as Dynamix was being dissolved/disbanded/etc.. by Sierra at the time so the technical expertise was not available.
However, now we have a bit more technical expertise available in the form of Gog. I'm not sure how much access Gog has to the original exported prototypes, but I would imagine it might be possible as the music is being accessed via OGG files and not the CD, so there's some form of OGG<->Redbook conversion going on.
So it depends on how Gog is implementing this routine. But certainly I think the possibility of patching this is much better now than it has been in years.
So keep your fingers crossed!
EDIT:
Aha!
I think we can do it ourselves.
Dosbox is taking care of creating a virtual CD using the OGG files. We can edit the "bak.inst" file and stitch tracks together for at least 2 playthroughs.
Obviously this will increase the memory footprint by a bit, but that should be fine.
Will post after testing this out. But here are some links that will get you all started:
http://www.dosbox.com/wiki/Cuesheet
http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/cdburnadv4.html
EDIT:
Well not finding support for this idea in the IMGMOUNT / Cuesheet implementation. At the very least we can duplicate certain files and join them together to at least get two plays of a given track.

@tz-auber

Did you ever get the audio to repeat?

I just had a go at stitching the audio files together, using the intro theme.

Funny thing is, I got a perfect 4x ogg vorbis loop of the intro, which cuts out at exactly the time of the original file, without repeating the parts that I put in. I know this, because the cross fade that I put in just starts...then stops.

I have double checked this, but I can't understand why the cue/bin setup would take a longer file, and chop it to be the size of the original (which it can't even see anymore because I took it out and replaced it)- is this actually coded into the .exe somehow?

Any ideas?

Also - if people are really interested in this (ie. getting looping music), please post here or PM me, and I will try my best to solve it...

I'd certainly be interested if you manage to get this fixed. :)

Hey Lehti

I consider myself pretty good on this stuff, and I could not get a working solution.

In the end, I went back to the original (non-cd) music because I realised that's what I had on my first playthrough 10 years ago.

The weird thing was that by Chapter 5 when I turned the music back again to the better quality CD I didn't like it all!

Well, not compared to the primitive midi things I had grown to love.

In this way, nostalgia helped me solve the problem. However, the track that makes me wet my pants is the theme in Silden, and I think the new version is way inferior, even from a non-nostalgic perspective...

If you manage to do it, post back because I will learn something if you can pull it off.

A totally separate issue to consider is that turning the CD audio off, it makes a difference whether your settings are sound blaster or roland mt-32. for some reason mt-32 (which has higher music quality) lacks the sound effects, so you don't hear lightning strikes, dragon fire etc.

That's because the MT-32 can only play midi and can't play digitized samples. This is why some games let you use different sound cards for midi and digital effects. Unfortunately, BaK is not one of them.

ScummVM allows one to now access the MT32 music files and the digital samples in Space Quest 3 (Roger Wilco says "Where Am I?") at the same time. So you can get both the special MT-32 samples (such as hatch swoosh sound, that the game programs into the MT-32's soundbank) and the sound card related digital speech.

Originally you could only choose MT-32 or alternative sound card, but not both. Due to a bug most people couldn't even hear the "Where Am I?" phrase unless they had a patched driver for the game.

There were other games that would program digital sounds into the MT-32 sound bank for that specific game, such as the foot step sounds in Ultima Underworld games. But I'm not sure if that was all that common.

Of course, none of this helps Kronder out, as the game is incompatible with ScummVM. But who knows maybe in the future it will be possible to patch the game to include both the MT-32 stuff and play the digitized stuff as well. Or someone could modify the drivers to program the digital sounds into the MT-32 soundbank?

Edit:

Apparently there is a patch to allow both General Midi and digitized sounds together;

http://www.gog.com/forum/krondor_series/guide_to_betrayal_at_krondor_music_and_sound_effects_settings