A proprietary Bethesda format that combines the lip-sync animation data ( .lip ) and the compressed audio data ( .xwm ) into a single file.
: The simplest method is letting Steam handle it. By changing the game's language in your Steam library settings, Steam will automatically download the correct Voices_XX0.bsa for your chosen language and configure the .INI files for you. A more manual, workaround approach is to rename the language-specific BSA files in the Data folder. For example, to get English audio with Russian subtitles, one could rename Skyrim - Voices_ru0.bsa to Skyrim - Voices_en0.bsa and vice versa. However, this is a less reliable method. Skyrim - Voices-en0.bsa
: The -en0 suffix indicates that this archive contains the English voice files. Other language versions of the game use different suffixes (e.g., -fr0 for French, -de0 for German). A proprietary Bethesda format that combines the lip-sync
Instead of dealing with a cluttered Data folder containing tens of thousands of individual sound files, the game reads a single, optimized .bsa file. This reduces seek times on your hard drive and organizes data in a way the engine can parse rapidly. A more manual, workaround approach is to rename