Change a vehicle's engine sound

Every vehicle in GTA V uses an audio profile for its engine, exhaust and gear sounds. An add-on car points at one of those profiles, so you can give it a different sound with one line, no audio editing needed.

Option 1: Use the sound of another GTA V vehicle

1. Open the vehicle's resource and go to the data folder.
2. Open vehicles.meta and find the entry whose <modelName> is your vehicle's spawn name.
3. Find the <audioNameHash> line in that entry:

<audioNameHash>BUFFALO</audioNameHash>

4. Replace the value with the spawn name of the GTA V vehicle whose sound you want, for example ADDER, ZENTORNO, SULTAN, DOMINATOR or SCHAFTER4. Upper or lower case both work.
5. Save the file and restart your server.

If the <audioNameHash> line is empty or missing, the game uses the sound of the vehicle's own model name, which for an add-on car usually means a generic default sound. Adding the line fixes that.

Option 2: Use a custom sound pack

Custom engine sounds come as their own resource with audio files (.awc) and audio data (.rel files). A pack's fxmanifest.lua loads them like this:

fx_version 'cerulean'
game 'gta5'

files {
  'audioconfig/*.dat151.rel',
  'audioconfig/*.dat54.rel',
  'audioconfig/*.dat10.rel',
  'sfx/**/*.awc',
}

data_file 'AUDIO_GAMEDATA' 'audioconfig/mysound_game.dat'
data_file 'AUDIO_SOUNDDATA' 'audioconfig/mysound_sounds.dat'
data_file 'AUDIO_SYNTHDATA' 'audioconfig/mysound_amp.dat'
data_file 'AUDIO_WAVEPACK' 'sfx/dlc_mysound'

Note that the data_file lines leave out the 151.rel, 54.rel and 10.rel endings. That is how FiveM expects them.

To use the pack:

1. Add ensure for the sound pack in server.cfg, above the vehicles that use it.
2. In the vehicle's vehicles.meta, set <audioNameHash> to the sound name the pack gives you (it is listed in the pack's readme, and is usually the name of the _game.dat151.rel entry).
3. Restart the server.

Option 3: Change the sound from a script

You can also swap the sound while the game runs, for example to give a tuned car a louder exhaust. Use the client native ForceUseAudioGameObject:

local vehicle = GetVehiclePedIsIn(PlayerPedId(), false)
ForceUseAudioGameObject(vehicle, 'adder')

This only changes the sound for the player whose client runs it. For everyone to hear it, every client has to run it for that vehicle, for example by setting a state bag on the vehicle and reading it on each client. For a permanent change, Option 1 is simpler.

The sound didn't change

• You edited the wrong entry. Check that the <modelName> above your change is the car you spawned.
• The XML broke. A missing < or / stops the whole file from loading. Look for errors in the server console when the resource starts.
• Old data is still loaded. Restart the whole server and reconnect, instead of restarting just the resource.
• Another resource loads the same car. If two resources both define the same <modelName>, the one that starts last wins.