If you're like me, you get bored listening to only a single station at a time when you're traveling around Night City, and wish you could just mix all the stations together, considering there's good music (and interesting news) on multiple different stations. And not only that, but it feels like you hear some songs too much and other songs never enough. Well, now there's a fix for that.

With this mod, every time you listen to your personal radio (in RadioPort, the Metro, or when driving a vehicle), the songs that play will be randomly selected from only what you've allowed to play (no matter what station they come from), and (by default) no song will play twice until every song (that you allow) has had a chance to play once.

Quick note: Only in-game music is supported. Other radio mod music like RadioExt is not. See 'Untested Potential Issues' below.

This mod also specifically lets the news and station identifications play, for extra immersion. And includes an on-screen notification for each song as it comes on, nice and big so you can actually read it. Or even set the track to display on your vehicle's dashboard. Or turn any of that off if you don't want it.

As a bonus, this mod will turn on your radio when you get in a vehicle. And let you control your RadioPort more intuitively: want it to automatically turn on (when allowed) and be on all the time? Or want to turn it off and force it to be off all the time? You pick. If you want it on, it stays on (when allowed). If you want it off, it stays off. Simple and intuitive.

And there's one final function to help you manage your playlist: The Forced setting, which temporarily Forces the song(s) you want to play. This way you can hear specific songs on request without messing up your overall playlist.

After a Forced song plays once, it will slip back into the 'On' list silently in the background. You can Force more than one song, in which case they'll play randomly until they've each played once and slip into your regular On playlist one by one as they're played. But I recommend using On for your main playlist and only Forcing songs as needed.

How to use:

This mod requires redscript. In addition, unless you want to run with the default settings and every song enabled, then you also need Mod Settings. Mod Settings itself requires ArchiveXL and RED4ext.

Once all that's installed, go into Mod Settings and adjust your settings. Turn On the songs you want, turn Off the songs you don't, and Force the songs you want to hear first (to help you decide whether to turn them On or Off). Honestly, that's pretty much it. You're done. If you're the kind of person that doesn't like to read very much, you can stop here, that's really all you need to know. =P

And as an FYI: you don't need the mod for this, but if you want to see the currently playing song (and which station it's from), press and hold your radio button to open the radio menu, which will display this info. While you're in this menu, selecting any station other than the current one will act like a song skip (once you close the menu, or instantly if you're driving), or you can just close the menu to keep listening to the current song.

Important Note about the News:

News can't be forced, it has to happen naturally, before or after a song. Which means in order to hear news from a particular station, you have to have at least one song enabled on that station. The more songs you have enabled on a station, the more chances you have to hear news from that station. Station identifications (the short "you're listening to" moments, also called blips) work the same way: you'll only hear them from stations you have songs enabled on.

So as an example, if you turn Off every single song from Growl FM, you will never hear any broadcasts from Ash, even if you have the news setting enabled.

Important Note about 99.9 Impulse:

This station doesn't have songs, or more correctly, it has one very long 'song' that includes its entire playlist. For this reason, whenever you skip to this station, the mod will not force it to start at the beginning, and you'll just catch whatever happens to be playing at the moment. In addition there is a setting for how many real-life minutes you want to listen to this station before skipping to another (default is 5 minutes but can be set up to 15 minutes). This setting only applies in RadioPort and the Metro. If you're in a vehicle, this station will play forever, until you get out of the vehicle.

Important Note about songs you can't play on the Metro:

Unfortunately, I have discovered about 40 songs that refuse to play on the Metro. I've reported this to CDPR. If you're wondering why the song you want to hear isn't playing, and you're on the Metro, that's why. Trying to force these songs to play (if they're at the end of a loop for instance) causes the game to hang.

As a workaround, the mod will skip any of these songs while you're on the Metro, but make note of which songs got skipped, and mark them Forced as soon as you get off the Metro (where they can play just fine). Note that adjusting anything in Mod Settings, before the songs play, will overwrite this function, and cause the songs to stay skipped until your next loop. Which brings me to the next point:

Important Note about Mod Settings:

Mod Settings does not support the concept of a mod changing settings on its own without you. What this means is, any changes the mod makes on its own, Mod Settings won't have any way of knowing about, and it's just going to display the last settings you set even if that's not the actual current settings anymore. What's more, if/when you adjust something in Mod Settings, this will overwrite all of the mod's current logic to what Mod Settings says your settings are.

This causes four problems with the mod:

Radio Toggling: You can toggle the RadioPort On/Off any time your radio button is active, but since we can't report that to Mod Settings, it will just display what you last set in Mod Settings. If you adjust anything in there then the radio will toggle back to what you have set in Mod Settings, but this isn't too big a deal because you can just toggle it again whenever.

Forced Songs: Any time you adjust anything in Mod Settings, all the songs marked Forced will get marked Forced again, even if they have already played. Because of this, you will need to manually turn them to On or Off after you're done Forcing them (unless you want them to be Forced again each time).

Metro songs: After getting off the Metro (see above), some songs may internally get marked Forced because they didn't get a chance to play on the Metro. This won't show up in Mod Settings, and if you adjust anything, Mod Settings will reset their status. This means the songs won't play again until your next loop.

Loading previous/different saves: Similarly, if you make a playlist change in Mod Settings (Off/On/Forced), but then load a previous (or different) save, the mod will go back to the playlist you had at the time of the save and your entire playlist in Mod Settings won't be accurate or reapplied until you adjust something in Mod Settings again. In this way you can kind of have different playlists in different save files, as long as you never open Mod Settings and adjust anything. (The overall settings aren't save-specific and so don't have this issue, just the playlist.)

The most common example: you hear a song play, and you don't like it so you turn it Off, but then you load a save from before you turned it Off, and the song plays again, which could be frustrating. (This happened because at the time of the save, the song was still On.) You check Mod Settings, and it still shows that you turned it Off, because the mod was unable to inform Mod Settings that you reverted to a previous/different save. So, you'll have to adjust something and 'apply' the changes for it to reapply to your game and turn that song Off again and bid it good riddance (as well as reapply any other playlist changes you made since that save).

If in the future Mod Settings supports the mod updating its own settings, this would fix these issues and allow the mod to work as intended, both in having save-specific playlists and intended Forced functionality. (In the example, you'd still have to turn the song Off a second time after loading a save from before you turned it Off, but that should feel intuitive, much like spending an attribute or perk point and then loading a save from before you spent the point.)
But that depends on Mod Settings' author and they're busy working on more important projects right now, so for now we just live with it. No biggie.

Minor Spoiler - Two Quest-Required Songs:

There are two songs that get added to the radio after certain choices are made in a certain quest. Unfortunately the names of these songs are mild spoilers for the quest, but I don't know of any way to hide them from the list if you haven't done the quest.

Whatever you set these two songs to (Off/On/Forced) will be ignored until until you have done the required quest/choices: they can't play, so the mod will turn them Off (which won't show in Mod Settings).

If you complete the required quest/choices, the songs will be automatically included in your playlist (this also won't show in Mod Settings). As a bonus, they'll even be marked Forced for you, so you hear them as soon as possible after unlocking them. At this point, if you instead want one or both songs to be Off, opening Mod Settings and adjusting anything will recalibrate these two songs to your desired settings and they'll work just like any other songs going forward. If you want to leave both songs On and have left them turned On in Mod Settings, you won't have to do anything, it'll just work.

Known Issues:

• The mod cannot operate while the radio menu is open when using the RadioPort or riding the Metro. It will resume once you've closed the menu. (The mod works in the radio menu while driving, however.)
• This mod description is a huge wall of text that I would be surprised if anyone actually reads it. V was here. Oh well. Writers gonna write. Known issue.
• There's a small chance that the game may already have been playing the song that the mod was about to request. In this case you'll catch the song in-progress instead of playing it from the beginning (just like with 99.9 Impulse). This is pretty rare, though, so more than likely you'll hear the whole thing next time. - If people report this happening a lot, I can try to address it, but won't bother if people aren't having the issue much or don't care.
  

Untested Potential Issues:

• I have not tested this with the 'block copyrighted music' setting. I won't bother to unless someone reports an issue.
• I do not intend to support compatibility with other mods which add music to the game, like RadioExt mods. You're welcome to comment on your experiences but I won't put effort into fixing issues. If another modder wants to fork this mod and create support of this type, you have my blessing and we can figure out how best to make it available to others.
• I leave looping and News broadcasts enabled. I have not done any testing with those settings turned off. In order to get support if you have any issues with these settings off, you'll have to tell me what issues you have, because otherwise I won't ever encounter those issues myself. (But as far as I know, they should work as expected if you turn them off. Crossed fingers.)
• Patch 2.1 added a lot with the RadioPort and the Metro. I haven't fully tested every single possible thing yet, but I figure the current version is good enough to release and people can report issues they come across.
  

In Conclusion:

Phew!

Hope you enjoy it. Yet again this is a mod I made mostly for myself but am sharing in case any others want/like it, too.

Let me know any issues you come across (except for compatibility with music-adding mods) and I'll see what I can do.