Driving Underground with Lucky Ali

Listening to rap music like Out of control by Rancid, while racing a car at speeds over 250 km/hr can be quite strenous. So last night, I and my friend Sanjeev set out to change the soundtracks bundled with Need For Speed Underground. EA Games stores all the 27 tracks in the directory SNDSTREAMS as an AST format file. After a little Googling and reading lots of posts from NFS fans, we stumbled on this excellent repository of NFS Underground software.

NFS Music Importer by Arushan works really well. The zipped archive comes bundled with a little tool from EA itself which imports MP3 files into ASF format. Then the music importer can flawlessly burn these soundtracks into the AST file. A minor glitch - you cannot change the number of tracks and only overwrite an existing track. But the soothing track of Kitni Haseen Jindagi Hai - Lucky Ali while racing a car is something not to be missed :) Please take a backup of the original AST, if you have not grown too old for rap.

This repository also has an NFS server for windows/linux and a cool patch which replaces the introductory movies, so that you get to the action faster. I have not read the EA license, but I cannot see them going gaga over this :) Please do read it before you face any damages. And finally, remember the EA advice - Leave the racing for the track. Drive safely.