This is probably no secret, but I haven't found a very good guide on properly replacing the music in Fallout. Mainly because people are just content with Drag-N-Drop replacing and that's it.
The problem I noticed with this, was:
A: A lot of my music isn't normalized and of varying levels of volume, thus when played over the radio, some are so soft I can't hear it, and some are so loud they overplay the voices in the background.
B: They don't show you how to replace the *_mono.xxx files that play when the station is playing on a background radio. So you'd still hear the song you replaced.
So, I'm going to teach you how to do a proper music replacement. I use WavePad, a non-free software, but the principles here not too complex and should carry over to other audio editing software.
First off, we're going to need to prep the audio clip we're going to use. For the sake of using non-copyrighted music, I'm going to use a Syrsa song, because he releases his songs under the Creative Commons license.
I'm going to be using Syrsa - Cythas - Magichnology for the tutorial.
EDIT: Since the site's download speed is horrendiously slow, here's a Mediafire link: Tutorial.rar.
(See 1.png)
So, as you can see, there's a huge amount of white noise at the end of the track because of the way I grabbed the song. This is common for YouTube audio grabbers. It's still a good idea to eliminate as much white noise at the begining and end of every track regardless of how long the white noise is. You can use Auto Trim (Edit->Trim->Auto Trim) but I find this does more damage than good. So it's always a good idea to chop the white noise off yourself.
What you need to do is put the bar at the beginning of the white noise, press and hold SHIFT then press END(inverse for the begining, go to the end of the noise, then press HOME). This will select all of the white noise. If you are satisfied with the selection you did, press DELETE, and it will be deleted.
(See 2.png)
Now it's deleted. But we're still not done with the song yet. We need to normalize the track. Go to Effects -> Normalize. I use 70%, but you can do whatever you want. I chose 70, because that matched the other original song's waveforms as close as possible. (See pic 3a.png if you don't know what the Normalizer is)
(See 3.png)
Now it's normalized and ready to be saved. This is the main track, so we're going to save it as a MP3. I'm replacing mus_generic_pink, so I'm going to save it as mus_generic_pink.mp3. I use 192Kbps Stereo because that's how I roll. If you get butthurt about the quality you can crank it up to 392, but you're just wasting HDD space. The game uses 98Kbps, so you can pretty much determine a feel for how over-the-top 192Kbps is.
(See 4.png)
Now we're ready to make the _mono versions. This is pretty easy, since WavePad does this for you. Go to Effects -> Special Effects -> Telephone.
(See 5.png)
Now, I know you're wondering: "why not just use AM Radio?" It just uses the bounds of the AM radio's frequency, and doesn't actually eliminate that much bass. I found the Telephone effect to more closely match the original _mono.xxx files.
Once it's done applying the effect, save it as a MP3. I used 96-Mono because that's what the game used. (EDIT: I noticed that the enclave files don't have a _mono.mp3 counterpart, so the .MP3 might not be essential to the background music. I still make the MP3 counterpart because it's there.)
(See 6.png)
We still need a .WAV form, so do another save as, and choose .WAV from the drop-down box. I used 22Khrtz-16-Mono because, yet again, that's what the game uses.
(See 7.png)
Once the WAV is finished encoding, move the 3 files to the radio folder you wish to replace.
That's it, you're done. Rinse lather repeat if necessary.
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