Thanks to a lot of work by myself and Darth Jane, its now possible to use PCCompression="EALAYER3" in the RA3 Mod SDK and have it work and produce output that will work in the game.

To use it, you unzip the attached zip file into the "tools" folder underneath the main Mod SDK folder (making sure to overwrite the BinaryAssetBuilder.exe.config file) and then you create your mod as normal using PCCompression="EALAYER3" for anything you want to use the EALayer3 compression for.

This means you don't need the special AudioFileMP3Passthrough stuff anymore and can do things the way EA did it.

For those who are curious (and understand what they are doing) you can download the source code here:
https://github.com/jonwil/ealayer3compilerplugin 
https://github.com/jonwil/snrtool 
https://github.com/jonwil/lame-3.96 

I am also in the process of trying to figure out the special PathMusic stuff and (if I can figure it out) may be able to produce a tool that can output PathMusic data as well.


If you have any questions about this, feel free to post here and I will do my best to answer them.   RA3 EALayer3 Audio Plugin.zip (162kb) downloaded 111 time(s).

I fixed a bug in the plugin, it should now work properly.

  RA3 EALayer3 Audio Plugin.zip (162kb) downloaded 108 time(s).

I finally sorted some further bugs in the plugin and now it should actually work correctly.

  RA3 EALayer3 Audio Plugin.zip (161kb) downloaded 112 time(s).