CMD v26.3 - Song Encounters
After two years of Custom Music Discs growing from a small collection of custom discs into a much larger project, we're taking another major step forward.
We're releasing Custom Music Discs 26.3 - Song Encounters, alongside Minecraft 26.3: Wilderness Bound on September 15th.
This update is more than just another collection of music. Song Encounters is the first CMD update released under our new versioning and development system, and it contains some of the biggest changes we've made behind the scenes.
And, of course, there's quite a bit of new music to discover.
🎶 Welcome to Wave 7
Song Encounters adds a massive 25 new music discs, all becoming part of the newly reorganised Wave 7.
The theme is exactly what the name suggests: musical encounters inspired by some of our favourite games, series, and internet phenomena. From Pokemon to Deltarune, The Backrooms, anime, and community-created music, Wave 7 is probably our most varied collection yet.
The new discs include three tracks created by CMD community member Nut3iiA:
Survive (Level! Part 1)
Panic (Level! Part 2)
Run (Level! Part 3)
The update also features music from Masatoshi Ono, Shiro Sagisu, Toby Fox, John Siegler & John Loeffler, John Loeffler & David Wolfert, Junichi Masuda, and Ed Goldfarb.
Among the new additions are a large collection of Deltarune tracks, several Pokémon themes, an anime classic, and more music inspired by the strange world of the Backrooms.
There are plenty of songs to discover, so we won't spoil every encounter here. You'll have to explore In-Game to see exactly what awaits.
🔨 New Ways to Find Your Music
Not every disc in Song Encounters is obtained in the same way.
We've expanded CMD's acquisition system with several new methods, giving some discs their own unique challenges.
Black Knife and Raise Up Your Bat, for example, are crafted using a Smithing Table, while The Second Sanctuary and The Third Sanctuary are obtained through brewing.
Some discs require you to do something a little more unusual.
Panic (Level! Part 2) requires the player to complete a special challenge involving suffocation, while Run (Level! Part 3) asks you to travel an enormous 100,000 blocks.
And if you're looking for a real challenge, Battle Frontier is awarded for completing all CMD: Combat Advancements.
We wanted Wave 7 to encourage players to interact with Minecraft in different ways rather than simply crafting every disc at a crafting table.
🏆 A Completely New Advancement Structure
One of the biggest changes in 26.3 is happening to CMD's advancements.
CMD's advancements are now separated from Minecraft's default advancement structure. Each wave has its own advancement tree, while CMD also has dedicated trees for:
CMD: Story
CMD: Adventure
CMD: Combat
CMD: Special
CMD: Dimensional
This makes the progression system much easier for us to expand and maintain, while also giving each part of CMD its own identity.
⚠️ Important: Existing Discs & World Progress
With all of these changes happening behind the scenes, there's an important warning for anyone updating an existing CMD world.
As mentioned in our previous announcement, some older discs have been affected by the internal restructuring.
Your world itself will be fine, and the affected items will not simply disappear. However, some older discs may have lost their textures, audio, or both.
If this happens, the solution is to recraft the affected disc. For discs obtained through adventures or exploration, you'll need to find them again in your world.
Most newer-wave discs should be unaffected, but we wanted to be completely transparent about this change.
This is intended to be a one-time transition as we move CMD onto its new foundation.
🌐 CMD Is Now Language-Driven
Another major technical change in 26.3 is something that might not be immediately visible to players.
Every part of CMD is now language-driven.
This means the datapack has been reworked to make full translations possible, allowing CMD to eventually support languages beyond English much more effectively.
It's a major backend change, but one that opens up a lot of possibilities for the future.
📦 Resource Pack Compression Continues
We're also continuing our work on reducing the size of the CMD Resource Pack.
This update brings compression to the mono audio files, following the previous work done with the stereo versions.
The goal remains the same: reduce the size of the pack while maintaining a listening experience that doesn't noticeably sacrifice sound quality.
🪶 CMD LITE Gets a Small Improvement
There aren't any major changes to CMD LITE in 26.3, but one technical change has created an interesting new possibility.
CMD structures now use Minecraft's newer data-driven villager trades. Because of this, LITE players can now obtain the three Wave 6 Pixel Remix discs that were previously exclusive to CMD villager trades without needing the special LITE crafting recipes.
The appropriate trade will appear when you have the correct villager type in the correct biome.
A small change behind the scenes, but a nice improvement for LITE players.
🖼️ Goodbye, AI-Generated Icons
If you've been following CMD for a while, you may notice something different about our project pages.
The old AI-generated project icons are gone.
Starting with Song Encounters, CMD's project icons have been replaced with artwork created by us and built entirely inside Minecraft before being turned into the final icons.
As AI-generated code, images, and text have become increasingly common, we've also seen growing scepticism toward projects using AI—especially because AI-heavy projects are increasingly associated with low-effort or low-quality content.
Modrinth's introduction of AI disclosures has also encouraged us to reconsider how we present CMD.
We wanted our icons to represent the same thing as the project itself: something made in Minecraft, for Minecraft.
📖 The Website Wiki Is Going Offline
There's one piece of CMD's documentation that we're finally doing something about—but perhaps not in the way some of you expected.
The external Website Wiki will be taken offline.
It's simply become too outdated, and maintaining an incorrect Wiki is worse than having no Wiki at all.
For the latest and most accurate information, we're directing players to the dialogue-powered CMD In-Game Wiki / Info Centre, which is updated alongside the pack itself.
The website isn't going anywhere, though. We'll continue using it for announcements, project information, downloads, and everything else surrounding CMD.
🎙️ Off The Record
CMD: Off The Record is also receiving its own 26.3 update.
The add-on has been updated to support the new version and can now play the new CMD music as background music in-game, bringing the two parts of the CMD experience closer together.
🌟 A Special Thank You
Song Encounters is particularly special because three of its 25 discs were created by community member Nut3iiA.
Community involvement has increasingly become an important part of CMD, whether that's through song requests, bug reports, suggestions, fan projects, or simply conversations about where the project should go next.
We're incredibly happy to see players not just using CMD, but actively helping shape it.
🛠️ The Beginning of a New CMD
26.3 isn't just another version number.
It's the beginning of the new CMD development model we announced earlier this year.
From now on, CMD will follow Minecraft's version numbering, allowing us to clearly communicate which Minecraft release the pack is designed for. We'll generally remain on a single version and wave throughout the year, adding content through smaller drops or larger updates depending on development time and real life.
And because real life exists, Song Encounters will also be our final major content update of 2026.
There may still be smaller content updates, patches, and improvements throughout the rest of the year, but major content updates will return in Summer 2027.
That doesn't mean CMD is going quiet, though. There's plenty happening behind the scenes.
🔮 What's Next?
While we're taking a little more time before the next major content release, development isn't stopping.
There's already work being done on something we've wanted to make possible for a long time: a CMD Mod.
One of the biggest limitations of CMD as a datapack + resource pack combination is Minecraft's server resource-pack size limit. The CMD Resource Pack is simply too large to make the experience practical for some server environments.
A dedicated mod could change that.
It's still a work in progress, but the goal is to eventually make Custom Music Discs playable on servers in a way that isn't currently possible with the standard pack.
— SMHerobrine
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