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Please find Part One here, and Part Two here!
What is “A Very Big Radio Expansion”?
This is a collection of new radio stations for your game, which will appear on all residential stereos and community speakers. New genres! New music for the existing ones! Atmospheric music! Podcasts! Tomb ambience! Background music for your venues! All this, and more!
Watch the UHD trailers!
The Sims 3 – A Radio Mod Preview – Trailer #1
The Sims 3 – A Radio Mod Preview – Trailer #2
The trailers are just a snippet of what’s included in the collection, but hopefully they give you a sense of how they can be used to enrich your game.
Why “A Very Big Radio Expansion”?
This project has been a long time in the making, about two years now. There are already a good handful of mods for The Sims 3 adding radio stations or building on the existing ones using music from other Sims games and other sources (for instance Music to their Ears by Nasenfahrrad, Converted Sims 4 Radio Stations by garrettgivre, Roaring Twenties Radio Music by bonbonxoxx and The Urbz: Sims in the City Radio Stations by Lost Pantheon) but what I had in mind for this project was something cohesive that will eventually be more expansive, too.
In particular, I’m interested in filling in the musical “gaps” that EAxis left when they wrapped up The Sims 3. Lots of world cultures, subcultures and themes got nods in the game through EPs, SPs and Store sets but without the music to go with it, something feels missing when you build a beautiful Mughal-inspired Indian mansion and garden, or a New Wave nightclub in Bridgeport. My ambition is for every look, feel and moment to have its own soundtrack.
On this page I have tables that list all the stations being added in my project so far. The “I’m ideal with…” column is where I’ve matched the new and expanded stations with content from various EPs, SPs and Store sets, as well as some of my favourite themed custom content sets, that should complement each other nicely. Finally, a Psychedelic Rock station for your Sims kitted out in Boho Vintage Style! Bluegrass for your rural Farm Fresh Folk house! Smooth Jazz piped into your Master Suite!
So what now?
This project isn’t finished yet, but I’ve reached a point where I’m ready to share the parts that are. My plans for the future are to create more stations, and to expand/refine the stations I’ve already made. Some of the them are more fleshed out than others right now, but you can check again later to see if any of them have received an update.
You’ll see below that I have a column in each table for the status of a particular station. Ideas I’ve had and suggestions I have accepted from comments or messages will be marked as “Pending” until I start working on them. Stations I’m still developing will be marked as “WIP” and then changed to “Coming soon” when they’re almost ready to publish. Once they are uploaded, I will either mark them as “Added” to show that it has been published on this mod page (under the Downloads tab), or as “Part One” or “Part Three” to show that you can find it on A Very Big Radio Expansion: Part One or A Very Big Radio Expansion: Part Three. I’m splitting the mod across multiple pages because there are so many individual parts, and the file sizes are to big to group them.
Part One is focused on my brand new genre stations, so that’s genre music that didn’t come with The Sims 3 or its DLC, like Ska, Grunge and Trance. Part Two is for my special stations, which is everything from seasonal music, to themed venue and event music, to the kind of ambient music you might use in tombs or to set the right atmosphere on a romantic date. Finally, Part Three is for my add-on content for the EAxis stations that shipped with the game (Pop, Indie, Latin, etc).
Installation
Each station has its own individual .package file and they are clearly labelled with the station names. These .package files are simply dropped into your Documents/Electronic Arts/The Sims 3/Mods/Packages folder in the normal way. You are welcome to use all the stations, or pick and choose which stations you would like in your game. Part One of this mod alone is roughly 2.5GB in size in total, so bear this in mind when downloading the files and adding them to you Mods folder.
I’ve tested the stations in my game both merged and unmerged and noticed no issues or performance impact in either case. Because of the huge file sizes, however, you may find that S3PE returns errors if you attempt to merge too many into a single .package file. It’s up to you how you’d like to handle the files.
The add-on stations for this section, Part Three, sometimes rely on EPs or SPs which are noted on the table below. Other than that, nothing else is required for these stations to work as intended. Anything listed in the “I’m ideal with…” column is purely optional. You can safely ignore it, if you prefer.
