Sure, Minecraft has their sound and music files saved in Ogg Vorbis format, and holds them in "C:\Users\<windows-user-nme>\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\resources".

Note: The 'AppData' folder is a hidden folder, so make sure you enable the viewing of hidden folders.

In Windows 7, you can do so by: Organize -> Folder and search options -> View -> "Show hidden files, folders, and drives"

This will vary from user to user, computer to computer, but once you find where yours is stored, you can mod it on your own machine. Once you get the modifications to the quality level you want to represent yourself as a composer, you can find someone in the Minecraft modding community who can help you package up your changes in a way that any Minecraft player could install.

Minecraft only officially supports texture packs, but a sound mod wouldn't be too hard to install.

Best of luck!

This thread has inspired me to start by modding Minecraft, which I already own.

If you don't want to play online, you can download the basic game for free. My brother mods it to make his own textures, change the color of certain ores, add glow effects, things like that.

When I googled 'Audio mod' just to see if there was such a genre of mods that only affected the audio, all I could really find was Minecraft related stuff. Is it easy to mod the audio?

They have a large community that supports modding, and my computer can barely run any modern games, so it's great for me. They're .ogg files as well as a few Finale files. The hardest part for me is going to be playing the .ogg files so I can figure out what each one is. For instance, they have 4 different footsteps on gravel. I need to know which one is walking, running, crouching/sneaking, etc.

Once I do this I'd like to move on to something like the Source Developers Kit to mod Half-Life 2 or Left 4 Dead, and then work with something more complicated like FMOD. There's a whole community of Half-Life 2 modifications that I could join once I do a couple replacements successfully.

One of the hiccups is that for the most part, game audio has evolved well beyond the notion of "a game event triggers a .wav playback". Modern games have very sophisticated audio engines-- a game event may cause multiple sound to be triggered, along with specific metadata (like pitch, volume, etc) for each. Gameplay variables may change how sounds are playing mid-stream, etc.

Best of luck-- please report back!

Am I right in thinking i recognize you? I'm sure you are the same person I once saw in a video, giving a lecture on game sound design? It was fantastic, and was in fact my introduction to all things game audio, on that day I decide to look into it for the first time! I'll feel quite silly if I'm confusing your dp with someone else, but if not I owe you many thanks for the perfect beginners introduction. =]

Reporting back for now: As I think I may have said, I started looking at UDK, and have got the hang of the basic interface and sound cue editior, so that ( and not to mention unrelated college work) has slightly steered my focus away from the 'reverse' engineering' query i made with this thread. I do however have the means to steer back due to something you said as shown in the quote above though. In what ways could one create, and replace the metadata you speak of? For example: If I wanted to edit the sounds in Arkham City, which was developed with Wwise, could I use my own copy of Wwise to re-integrate the audio, somehow? I have dabbled in Wwise before, so feel confident I could utilize some of it's features, but I'm still at a level where I'm not sure where the line is drawn between sound designers and programmers, when it comes to events. I know how to create an event in Wwise, but I'm not sure how I can have that correspond with a pre existing game, knowing very little about the programming/techy side of things.