itunes support

[mitra]

I know allot of people want music to be available through the game..
an from 2.1 only ogg will be supported. so why not add support for itunes, winamp or something else that works cross-platformwise?  allows everyone to listen to all their music without placing it in special folders etc..

[Hatsjoe]

Startup itunes, play all your music in random order, Turn music in wz off, DONE
You can even use media buttons on your keyboard to control music.

(instead of playing all yout music files, make yourself a wz playlist and play that (to avoid britney spears ruining the game)

[kage]

besides which, winamp is windows only, and itunes isn't so much "cross-platform" as it is "multi-platform". conversely, ogg actually is truely cross-platform.  hatsjoe is right: if you want to use an existing playlist, even if all you music does happen to be in ogg format, your best bet is going with the program you already use (computers have been able to effectively multitask non-realtime-critical tasks (such as music and games) nearly forever, despite all the dual-core propaganda you may have been hearing.

it's definitely in the best interests of the developers to simplify format support code (if you only support one format, you can get rid of all software abstractions that had been created to provide format-agnosticism, and, in many cases, improve engine performance depending on how you were forced to use buffering), and this is one case where it really doesn't make any kind of noticable difference for users.

[doom3r]

I agree with Kage, OGG should be the default music format, even if it could be difficult for some user to convert an mp3 in an ogg.

[cybersphinx]

The ingame music player really isn't supposed to replace winamp or whatever, but to make it possible to include music for the game (e.g. in a mod). For that the music needs to be encoded to ogg-vorbis once by the person making the mod. If you want to abuse it as a general music player go ahead, but I don't think much work will be done to make that easier.

[Buginator]

While it would be a nice feature, I have to agree with the others.


If you are on windows, you can pipe the music from your itune device into your soundcard, then mix it that way.  Assuming of course your soundcard supports that kind of thing.

[DevUrandom]

While it would be a nice feature, I have to agree with the others.

If you are on windows, you can pipe the music from your itune device into your soundcard, then mix it that way.  Assuming of course your soundcard supports that kind of thing.

I know from personal experience that Linux can do that too. And I bet OSX as well.
Thus I agree, too.

[Chojun]

Typically I prefer .mp3 but I think the folks around here probably find it difficult to use since the owner of the .mp3 patent (Thompson) has a stranglehold on the format.  .mp3 licensing for games is EXTREMELY expensive. 

Normally I prefer and appreciate commerce and capitalism but this case just makes me angry >:(

Besides, from what I hear .ogg is a slightly superior format to .mp3, isn't it?

[kage]

ogg generally gets better quality per bit than mp3 in the mid and high freq stuff, and comparable quality in the low frequencies, but does take at least 50% more processing power to decode, and the typical mp3 encoders tend to work use low bitrates by default while the ogg ones tend to use mid-range bitrates by default (thus ogg has the appearance of being high-quality, high disk space, when it can also compress well too with some user tweaking).  mp3 also obviously has much greater software support in the general world of software.

essentially, if you didn't buy your sound card separately, or you are just using the speakers that came with your computer, then keep using mp3 (you wouldn't notice the difference anyways). if you bought highend hardware, then ogg is a good middle-of-the-road contender, as is aac from what i hear, but at that point it's just as easy to go with a lossless compression format.

[Kamaze]

OGG has better sound quality at low bitrates, means <= 128 Kbit/s.
Anything above doesn't really matter, since the difference will be very hard to notice.

Kage, 50%?
I think you mixed something up
OGG isn't very well supported on mobile media players because the compression-algorithm of OGG/Vorbis originally uses only floating points,
while mp3 uses integer instructions only. (floating points capable processing units are more expensive)
But since a while there exists a OGG/Vorbis implementation which works only with integers as well.

[Giel]

OGG has better sound quality at low bitrates, means <= 128 Kbit/s.
Anything above doesn't really matter, since the difference will be very hard to notice.

Actually I do notice the difference...

Kage, 50%?
I think you mixed something up
OGG isn't very well supported on mobile media players because the compression-algorithm of OGG/Vorbis originally uses only floating points,
while mp3 uses integer instructions only. (floating points capable processing units are more expensive)
But since a while there exists a OGG/Vorbis implementation which works only with integers as well.

Actually the algorithm doesn't depend on either floating point arithmatic or integer arithmatic. And the implementation from Xiph.org supports both (I think they supported both from the beginning).