Guides / Building & Resources

Replacing sounds with a resource pack: sounds.json and the .ogg requirement

Minecraft only plays Ogg Vorbis, and a sound event is not a file. Here is the mapping file, how to add a sound instead of replacing one, and why yours is silent.

2026-06-25

Sound replacement fails quietly more often than any other resource-pack feature, and it is nearly always one of two things: the wrong audio format, or a misunderstanding of what a sound event is.

Only Ogg Vorbis

Minecraft plays .ogg (Vorbis) and nothing else. An .mp3 or .wav renamed to .ogg will not play — the container has to actually be Ogg.

Mono versus stereo matters too: only mono files are positioned in 3D space. A stereo file plays at constant volume everywhere, which is right for music and wrong for a block sound. If your custom anvil sound seems to follow you around, it is stereo.

A sound event is a name, not a file

entity.pig.ambient is an event. It maps to a list of files, one of which is chosen at random each time. Replacing a pig sound means redefining the event, not dropping a file somewhere.

assets/minecraft/
├── sounds.json
└── sounds/custom/my_pig.ogg

{
  "entity.pig.ambient": {
    "replace": true,
    "sounds": [ "custom/my_pig" ]
  }
}

Three details:

• replace: true discards the vanilla list. Leave it out and your sound is added to

the pool, so it plays sometimes and the original plays otherwise. Both behaviours are useful; the default is add.

• Paths omit sounds/ and .ogg. custom/my_pig resolves to

assets/minecraft/sounds/custom/my_pig.ogg.

• sounds.json sits at the assets/minecraft root, not inside sounds/.

Per-file options

"sounds": [
  { "name": "custom/my_pig", "volume": 0.8, "pitch": 1.2, "weight": 3, "stream": false }
]

• weight biases random selection within the list.
• stream: true for anything over a few seconds — music and records. Non-streamed

long files are loaded fully into memory and can stall the client.

• volume cannot exceed 1.0. Louder means a louder source file.

Adding a brand-new sound

Use your own namespace so nothing collides:

assets/my_pack/sounds.json
assets/my_pack/sounds/spell.ogg

{ "spell": { "sounds": ["spell"] } }

Then /playsound my_pack:spell master @a ~ ~ ~ 1 1. Custom sound events work with /playsound and in note blocks via a jukebox song definition; they do not automatically attach to any game action.

Why it is silent

1. Not real Ogg Vorbis.
2. Path includes sounds/ or .ogg.
3. sounds.json is invalid JSON — a trailing comma kills the whole file, so every sound

in the pack goes silent, not just the new one.

1. Wrong pack_format, so the pack loads but assets are ignored.

Cheat-sheets for the pack folder structure, sound event remapping and animated textures are in the Resource Pack Reference Tools.

Open the Resource Pack Reference Tools →