Ahoy me hearties! Captain Redbeard here with a brief tutorial on how to extract, edit, and replace audio files for both voice overs and sound effects in League! The process is a bit in depth and there are some things I don’t explicitly cover, as I find them to be self explanatory or they are covered elsewhere on the site.
If you encounter any issues with this tutorial or you don’t understand part of it, you can ask for help on the Killerskins-Discord server
or you can contact me directly: Captain Redbeard#5190
Table of Contents
Required tutorials
In order to follow this tutorial you must understand and be able to follow the following tutorials:
Required tools
OPTIONAL: Feel free to use Adobe Audition in place of Audacity, or your audio editor of choice.
Written tutorial
1. Extraction and conversion
Before we really start, we need to make sure that we get the right .wad.client files so we can access the sound banks we need. You’ll need to use Obsidian and navigate to your League of Legends install location, and follow this file path: …/League of Legends/Game/DATA/FINAL/Champions. You should see this:
For the sake of this tutorial I’ll be adding Gangplank’s theme to his ult laugh, which I know is in his voice over.
Next you need to open BNK Extract and select the appropriate files so you can grab whatever .wem files you are editing.
For champions:
- Bin file for the skin and champion you are editing (in my case skin0.bin)
- Audio file (the WPK you extracted from the wad.client)
- Events files (it should be labeled as …events.bnk, for both voice over and sound effects).
For announcers:
- map11.bin
- announcer_global_female1_vo_audio.wpk
- announcer_global_female1_vo_events.bnk
Next we will use Foobar2000 and the plugin we installed to easily convert our audio from .wem to .wav, or any other file type for that matter.
Run the installer and open the program.
Download the plug-in.
Go to File – Preferences and inside the “Components” menu point press “Install…”. Select the file you just downloaded.
Then restart foobar.
Simply drag in your extracted .wem files, select all, right click > Convert > Quick Convert, select WAV from the list, and then click the ‘Convert’ button.
Save them somewhere you can find them.
2. Edit your audio files
So this is going to differ based on your needs and based on what audio editing software you have access to. Use Audacity, Adobe Audition, etc. to edit your files.
IMPORTANT: Before finalizing your sound-edit make sure to amplify it by 5db. Otherwise it will become rather silent in LoL.
Then save as .wav.
3. Convert to .wem
Here we will need to open Wwise in order to convert these files back to their original file type (.wem) so we can replace them in the .wpk file. To get Wwise you will need to make an Audiokinetic account, and download the version labelled ‘2016.2.6’ — this is the version the League uses for handling audio.
Once Wwise is installed, open the program and create a new project.
The name of the project does not matter, as we are only using it to convert our .wav files to .wem.
Click on ‘Project’, and then ‘Project Settings’.
Click ‘Source Settings’, and then the (…), and double-click on ‘Vorbis Quality High’. Close out of that menu.
Next we need to import our edited .wav files.
Click ‘Add Folder’, and select the folder where you have your edited audio files, and then click ‘Import’.
Select ‘Convert All Audio Files’, and click ‘OK’. A window may appear for a brief moment and then close again, which is a good sign.
Open ‘File Manager’ to locate your converted files.
Right click the ‘Project Folder’ file path, and click ‘Open Containing Folder’.
Navigate to …/.cache/Windows/SFX/audio, and inside should be your .wem files. Move them somewhere more easily accessible if you need.
4. Replace Files
We’re almost done! Go back to BNK Extract, and follow these steps for replacing the audio:
1. Expand the category of audio you are editing (in my case, GangplankR_Laugh).
2. Expand the second drop down inside, and then select all the .wem files contained within.
3. Click ‘Replace wem data’, and then select all your converted .wem files from earlier. It will randomly replace the existing .wem files with the ones you selected. Do so however many times for each different category of sound.
4. Make sure once you are done repeating those steps however many times, you click ‘Save as bnk/wpk’ and save the .wpk somewhere convenient, or just replace the original one you had opened to start with.
And you are done! You can click the files in BNK Extract and listen to see if it was replaced properly. From here what you need to do is pack the files into a .wad.client using LCS Manager and install it as a mod!
Here is a download to the mod!
Tips
1. Stay organized
If you are editing a whole voice over or editing mass amounts of sound effects, I seriously recommend saving files to folders labeled to help you remember what they are for. You could copy whatever name is used in BNK Extract to make the process of replacing them easier.
