What you'll need:

BrawBox

BrawlBox is a great tool for messing with Wii games and such, but it also works for looping Wii, 3DS, and Wii U music. You can download it here.

Audacity (Optional)

Audacity makes the process of looping considerably easier. I'd recommend using it as you can sometimes skip the "looping" step just by using this program. You can get it here.

How to use your music!

If you chose to download Audacity, follow this guide. If you decided to skip Audacity, then skip to step 4.

Step 1: Import the song into Audacity.

Press Ctrl+Shift+I to browse for a song. Pick whichever song you want to use and it'll be imported.

Step 2: Simplify looping.

You're gonna see something like this when you import your song. You won't be needing most of these options so don't worry about them.

You'll see some spikes and such across your imported file. This is a visualisation of the song and it can be quite helpful. For example, I can see that the song gets quieter at this point because the sound waves are smaller. Now, do you see how there's a similar pattern across the sound visualisation? You can use this to look at which parts are already looping!

Let's look back at the starting area of our import. It's quite a long intro and I'd like to get rid of it.



Zoom in with Ctrl+Mouse Wheel and find the place where the main song starts. Click on it.



Now click and drag your cursor from that point and take it back to the left. Hit "delete" on your keyboard to remove it.



Listen to the sound at the start of your edited song. See if you can find a similar sounding noise later on in the song. You'll probably find it at the start of the second loop. I found mine here:



If that's the same thing as the start, that means we can delete everything after that point. Then we'll have our edited file ready for BrawlBox! But you might want to check to see if your file actually loops properly before importing. Maybe you needed to be a bit more accurate with your deletion. So here's how to check!

Method 1: Loop the song.

If you press Ctrl+Space then the song will start playing as normal. But now it'll play on repeat. So when you reach the end of your loop, it'll go back to the start. This will let you see if it plays in a way that you find satisfactory. If it doesn't go from the start, click on the start of the song like when you selected parts earlier.

Method 2: Duplicating the song.

This is quicker and probably a better use of your time. Press Ctrl+A to select the whole thing then press Ctrl+C to copy it. Click on the very end of the song. You'll see the line turn blue and yellow.



Now press Ctrl+V to paste it. To test your looping, click on a section that's slightly earlier than your duplicate and press play. Now you can see if you did it properly or not.

Volume Fixes

If your song is too quiet, it might not sound very good on the 3DS. To make it louder, press Ctrl+A to select the whole thing, go into the "effects" tab and select "normalise". Don't mess with the settings. Instead, just press "OK". Now the song will be as loud as it can be without distortion.

Note: It might make the song quieter. If that happens, you can use the standard volume slide to make it louder.



Step 3: Export your song

Exporting is really simple. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to choose where you want to save it. Simple. But make sure you're saving it as a .wav file so you can import it into BrawlBox later.



Step 4: Importing the song into BrawlBox

When you've opened BrawlBox, you'll need to tell it that you're making music. Choose "File" from the top and follow this path:

File > New > Audio > BRSTM Audio Stream

You won't actually be making a BRSTM but don't worry. Anyway, when you click "BRSTM Audio Stream" you'll be asked to choose a file. Pick out the wav that you made with Audacity or a wav that you downloaded from the internet. You should now see this:



Step 5: Looping your song

Looping is actually really simple. It's a little tedious, but if you've edited your song with Audacity it'll make life so much easier. Tick the little box in the bottom left corner that says "Loop" and then start doing just that.

You can slide the yellow line around to set the startpoint and you can slide the red one about to set the endpoint. You might not need to adjust them if you've looped it in Audacity.

If you find that you can't get the slides to loop your song correctly, edit the numbers in the "start" and "end" boxes. Hopefully you won't need to do that.

Step 6: Exporting your custom song

Hit "Okay" and you're almost there. Congratulations for that. It'll encode your song and take you back to the starting area of BrawlBox. Click on your new file and press Ctrl+E to export it.



IMPORTANT NOTICE: Remember how you were supposedly making a brstm stream? Well, a "brstm" is a file used by the Wii. If you're making custom music for the 3ds or wii u, you'll need to pick something different.



Go into the drop down menu. If you're making 3DS music, pick "bcstm". If you're making Wii U music, pick "bfstm". Once you've done that, you can save your file!

Step 7: Find the correct filename.

This is kinda obvious, but you can't replace the file unless you know what you're replacing. Look through the game's files to find the correct song. If you're making the song for someone else, you can just thrust it in their face and ask them to find it. You can rename the song at any time. In my tutorial, I was making custom music for Mario Maker 3DS' title screen. That means I have to name my file "bgm_title_trk0.dspadpcm.bcstm".