changing the music

Don't know. Didn't buy the game for the music. Never listened to a single note. I can see how you would get tired of it after a while.

You can change it by putting the music to this folder, but you have to change the track names in settings.txt, too. If you are playing a mod, you must also change the names in that setting.txt. If you just change the names of the tracks to the ones originally in the music folder before copying them there (and thereby deleting the old ones), that should work, too.

It would be cool to substitute early Pink Floyd. Remove the stock stuff and add Astronomy Domine, Interstellar Overdrive, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Echoes, etc., etc.

Setting up the ini file to play music is quite fiddly though, and the game plays the same track again and again unless you adjust the volume settings or advance a turn. I prefer to use a media player in the background. For me, WinAmp gives me a white flicker in SE5, but Windows Media Player works fine. I used to play a custom playlist of Masters of Orion 2, 3 and Ascendancy themes, but now I'm on the X3: Reunion soundtrack on shuffle...

Ascendancy was cool (except the AI made the Space Empires AI look like a genius ).