Simple Music Control
This mod tweaks the playback of background music in the game:
- Reduced delay between music tracks. By default, background music plays twice as often.
- Next track keybind: When pressed, immediately starts playing the next music track, and stops the current one if it's playing. Keybind is set to M by default and can be changed in the vanilla keybinds menu.
- Now Playing widget that shows the artist and track name in-game when a track starts playing and in the pause menu while a track is playing.
- Pausing the game no longer pauses background music.
- Creative mode music has a chance to play in survival mode.
- When playing a jukebox, background music will be stopped. Background music will also not start while a jukebox is playing nearby.
- Additional optional control over situational music.
Every feature can be configured and toggled on/off in the config.
Fabric requirements:
NeoForge requirements:
- Minecraft 1.21.11 and above: Fzzy Config required
- Minecraft 1.21.10 and below: No requirements
Inspiration and mod recommendations
I really like Minecraft's music, but it just doesn't play as often as I want it to, and some of the best tracks are locked behind creative mode for some reason (meaning you can never hear Aria Math in survival… wtf mojang?). I used Mixtape for these purposes before, but that mod has way more features than I actually need and it hasn't been updated in a while.
In modern Minecraft versions, music distribution has became skewed towards newly added tracks, especially since 26.2 (relevant bug tracker report). I recommend two solutions:
- Music and Melody is a mod that fixes music distribution in modern MC versions, allows toggling albums on and off, and adds new Minecraft-themed tracks to the game, among other things. I highly recommend it as it's compatible with Simple Music Control and I consider it a companion mod.
- Fair Melodies is a more lightweight approach to fixing music distribution. It's a resource pack that gets rid of situational music altogether (except in a few places) and allows any track to play anywhere, with C418 music being prioritized.
Minecraft is a bit too silent in general for my tastes, so here are some sound mod recommendations to help break the silence in the game and bring in some more sound variety:
- Euphonium: The only ambient sound mod that I think doesn't feel out of place in Minecraft.
- Presence Footsteps: Incredibly high quality footstep sounds. I can't play without this anymore.
- Sound Physics Remastered: Turns cave exploration into a whole different experience.
- ExtraSounds Next: Satisfying UI sounds for moving items around inventories.
