[Giel]

Has anyone triped adding MP3 support to MZX?

[asgromo]

It would be trivial to add mp3 support to MegaZeux. It's not done because it would encourage silly people to package (even more) music they don't have any rights to with their games. Just convert what you need to oggs.

[Lachesis]

MP3 is a bit more bloated than OGG in my experience, and really only encourages the use of commercial music in games, a biiiig no. Besides, don't you have to pay for lame.dll, or pirate it? It seems unlikely to me that MP3 support will ever be added to MZX, and it hasn't been added in the past 6+ years that people have been bugging the developers for its inclusion.

edoit: grammar

This post has been edited by Lachesis: 22 January 2010 - 10:44 PM

[ThDPro]

As much as I agree that the use of commercial music in mzx is BADBADBADBADBADBADBADBADBAD, I sometimes wish i could add my own music that isn't made with dated and tiresome trackers, but yeah, it's danger danger danger with mp3 and careless game makers. But still, I would find a good, legal use for mp3 support and it would add immense new dimensions of my ability to incorporate music with mzx.

That having been said, I believe ogg fills the same hole... So why bother?

[Seventh Shade]

Giel, get an mp3 to ogg converter.

[weasel]

OGG is better. It compresses smaller/better, doesn't do nasty shit to your music and make it hard to listen to anything with cymbals in it, and also doesn't add tiny gaps to the beginning and end of your music that make it noticeable when you're playing a song on full loop.

There's tons of freely available music at the Newgrounds audio portal among other places; it's all available for Creative Commons. Most of it is MP3, though, which is where a converter like WinLAME would come in handy.

Simply put, I'm all for the lack of MP3 support in Megazeux, just to stop people from putting lame-ass Coldplay tracks in their games.

[Giel]

ThDPro, on Jan 22 2010, 05:04 PM, said:

As much as I agree that the use of commercial music in mzx is BADBADBADBADBADBADBADBADBAD, I sometimes wish i could add my own music that isn't made with dated and tiresome trackers, but yeah, it's danger danger danger with mp3 and careless game makers. But still, I would find a good, legal use for mp3 support and it would add immense new dimensions of my ability to incorporate music with mzx.

That having been said, I believe ogg fills the same hole... So why bother?

Whats wrong with putting commercial music in MZX games? Its not like as if we were SELLING the games. (which we're NOT doing)

[Seventh Shade]

Mostly because we have people around that would post a tiny, crappy little game with 20+ megs of music culled from incredibly lame bands. It's quality control.

This post has been edited by Seventh Shade: 23 January 2010 - 12:01 AM

[Lachesis]

ThDPro, on Jan 22 2010, 05:04 PM, said:

I sometimes wish i could add my own music that isn't made with dated and tiresome trackers

Why aren't you saving your own music as WAVs (or some other lossless format, or some sort of project file that could easily be converted or exported to an OGG)?

edit: "dated and tiresome" ? :-/

This post has been edited by Lachesis: 23 January 2010 - 12:17 AM

[Terryn]

I'd rather we not break our open-source model to support something that overlaps nearly 100% with current functionality, thanks. Also, regarding WHY you want it in, copyright owners can be very vigilant about their properties, and it doesn't matter if you're intending to make money off of them or not. Those people busted by the RIAA weren't making money off of sharing music in P2P, remember, and in the olden days, even an MZX project supposedly had a C&D thrown at it ("Chrono Trigger MZX").

To expand what I say in that help file no one reads, there's fair use provisions in US law, but if you're smart enough to know how to deal with that kind of thing properly, you really shouldn't be asking questions like this in the first place, and you're probably not intending to follow fair use provisions anyway.

[ajs]

I will not be adding MP3 support to MZX.

If you want a good, free piece of software to render MP3 to Ogg with some limited bitrate configuration, try Audacity.

• File -> Open (browse to MP3 file)
  
• Wait a second
  
• File -> Export
  
• Click "Options" at the bottom and slide "Quality" to 0 (or 1, or 2, if you must)
  
• Save your file.

It is probably now much smaller than the input MP3 was, and can be loaded by MZX.

@Giel: US copyright law prohibits distribution of copyright material without permission in most cases. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use for more information on the exceptions.

(EDIT: Guess this is OT for the thread but the topic was pretty crappy so I don't feel too guilty.)

FYI did some experiments with various encoding options with Ogg Vorbis. I recorded a 37 second section of the intro to Spain by Chick Corea and varied some options. The original MP3 was ~132kbps variable joint stereo (LAME), and was 650K.

• 44100Hz, Stereo, Quality 0 OggV - 251K
  
• 44100Hz, Mono, Quality 0 OggV - 204K (19% smaller)
  
• 22050Hz, Stereo, Quality 0 OggV - 233K (8% smaller)
  
• 22050Hz, Mono, Quality 0 OggV - 180K (28% smaller)

IOW reducing sample rate is mostly pointless and the space savings are meagre. Stereo doesn't cost as much as you might think (at least in this sample). So unless you know you want small files or don't care about stereo, directly converting from MP3 and turning down the OggV quality is good enough.

--ajs.

[ThDPro]

Lachesis, on Jan 22 2010, 04:09 PM, said:

Why aren't you saving your own music as WAVs (or some other lossless format, or some sort of project file that could easily be converted or exported to an OGG)?

Because it's too big no matter what I do. Once its small enough, It sounds like computer chips on helium. You know that though... And I knew what you said. I figured I'd return the favor of saying something obvious. I just don't want to fill a game with 20mb of music and 1mb of .mzx.
I mean, isn't the size issue a little more than obvious? If you want more than one track for any given game, you're devoting another 2mb to it. By the time you've furnished your game with proper music, (preferably pieces of more than 37 seconds in length) you've filled a zip file to the tune of 20mb.

On the other hand, some people DO use ogg for music. And it works. And 20mb just isn't that big anymore. And I really couldn't care less about the 20mb I lost from the game. It doesn't really matter given the current computers DL speeds (I'm sure we're not going to spend an hour downloading anything made in mzx... At least, you couldn't convince me to.) and how much memory we're willing to shell out to mzx.

And still, there is no reason to add mp3.

Quote

edit: "dated and tiresome" ? :-/

Yes? are they not? Sure, they get the job done, but real music just feels better and we all know it. You can't simulate a proper orchestra with modplug.

This post has been edited by ThDPro: 23 January 2010 - 02:06 AM

[CJA]

ThDPro, on Jan 22 2010, 09:06 PM, said:

Yes? are they not? Sure, they get the job done, but real music just feels better and we all know it. You can't simulate a proper orchestra with modplug.

No, you're right about the last part. MIDI does a better job of that.

Anyway, tracker music is an actual genre, as much as chiptune is, because of its distinctive feel. If you render a track to an MP3, it (supposedly) doesn't become "real music," so in order to support your point you're going to have to draw the line here:

What is "real music?" Why is "real music" better? Is "real music" more available and does it net a better result overall, considering musicians of any experience level?

Listen: it strikes me as ridiculous to use Cubase Pro or FL Studio 17 to make music for a GCS from 199X. Enjoy your piano rolls!

[Exophase]

ThDPro, on Jan 22 2010, 09:06 PM, said:

Yes? are they not? Sure, they get the job done, but real music just feels better and we all know it. You can't simulate a proper orchestra with modplug.

Get back to me when you convince an orchestra to compose music for your game. Orchestrated music might have its perks but so does music custom tailored for the game at hand. Even if you can't do music yourself or get someone else to do it you'll still have a much broader range of things to pick from if you don't limit yourself to something composed by an orchestra. In fact, if you do the latter you're liable to not get an original work.

[KKairos]

Sure MOD formats are dated. Who cares? Some of the awesomest and most timeless stuff I've heard has been in MOD format. OGGs are fine, too, IMHO. I personally would rather not do MP3s and thus (as people have noted) further faciilitate the bombarding of me with the MP3 collections of others.

(Now I did get bombarded with Luke Drelick's MP3s in the Kikan remake, but (a) he took the time to make them OGGs / make them loop, and (b) Drelick actually has decent taste in music, even so much so that I went and bought two of the songs from that soundtrack.) Drelick's game was a good example of how to bombard people with commercial music in an MZX game, if you must.

But it is far from clear to me that we must, and frankly for reasons of my own ethical preferences (that is, to not include commercial music in games without the proper license, even if the games are free) as well as my aesthetic preferences (to not include commercial music in MZX games, just because that's a recipe for KKairos being forced to listen to EMO BAND XXP while playing a game), I say let's not do this. Aesthetic preferences are actually my top concern here. [[Note to CJA/Guy: EMO BAND XXP sounds like the name of your next game!]]

People who are really insistent, who really care enough, will find a way to convert to OGG, and maybe then at least the preferences of those with aesthetic concerns will be more respected--that is, people will really be acting in sincere belief that what they're converting will be the best thing for their game.

[Exophase]

Terryn, on Jan 22 2010, 07:35 PM, said:

and in the olden days, even an MZX project supposedly had a C&D thrown at it ("Chrono Trigger MZX").

Are you serious? I don't remember this happening at all. With all the other Chrono Trigger fan projects that got shut down it's pretty believable but that also makes it read like a pretty funny joke.

Or a hoax, as you implied.

Man, Chrono Trigger MZX back in the day would have probably been pretty lousy.

[Terryn]

It was FlashBlast, the person who didn't enter a DoZ because he said that he found out about it too late and that two weeks was not enough time to make his entry, so I take absolutely no stock in what he said about his project at all.

[Micah]

ThDPro, on Jan 22 2010, 05:04 PM, said:

That having been said, I believe ogg fills the same hole... So why bother?

That's what she said.

[RyanThunder]

In the case of MegaZeux, OGG files are the superior format to MP3s.

First off, who would want to use music by a licensed artist in a MegaZeux game to begin with? I can't think of anyone who would want to listen to Fall Out Boy while shooting built-ins or Robotic objects. That would be like the equivalent of playing a Resident Evil game with Britney Spears background music; the two do not mix. Even if it's just orchestrated music by some random licensed artist, you can still avoid using it by using public domain stuff instead, which there is plenty of (this is exactly what I did for Voluntary Solitude). The only possible case I could think of to use a licensed song would maybe be for an intro theme to your game, but even then you can most likely do better.

You can get OGG files to bitrates as low as 80 kbps with only a very small difference in quality (which is virtually unnoticeable unless you were deliberately trying to hear for it, or know a higher quality version of the given song), and an MP3 would sound horrible at that low of a bitrate. This is especially awesome since OGG files with that bitrate will equal to the filesize of about any typical XM or IT file.

This post has been edited by RyanThunder: 23 January 2010 - 08:28 AM

[Sai'ke]

Uhm, "(which is virtually unnoticeable unless you were deliberately trying to hear for it, or know a higher quality version of the given song)"? xD

Maybe on laptop speakers it isn't xD. I agree with the fact that OGG compresses much nicer than MP3 though

As for the orchestra thing mentioned earlier in this thread... you can get quite reasonable results using certain hefty VSTs, and it is sure a lot easier than using samples and a tracker for instance. Also, there are a lot of genres of music where effects processing, mixdown and loudness matters a lot but admittedly, they don't make good game music most of the time .

If anything would be done regarding the sound engine.... I'd love the ability to have channel control, such as panning, volume and perhaps even some crude state filters. That would open doors to active music based on short OGG loops. Now that would make things interesting.

[Pyro1588]

as a random note tangentially related to mod music and non-mod music, i give you a fun fact for the day that john emailed me:

"your fun fact for the day" said:

So you remember "Catch That Goblin!" a.k.a. the title music from Bernard the Bard? Turns out the guy who wrote it did the soundtrack for Max Payne.

i'd like to point out that catch that goblin is one of the niftiest mods in all of ever and was put to awesome use in btb. i'd also like to point out that max payne had a phenomenal soundtrack that sticks out to me as one of the most immersive and iconic video game soundtracks i've heard to date. everyone remembers that low bass synth, right?

[Sai'ke]

Skaven also did another track that is quite similar to Catch that Goblin later actually.

[Lachesis]

Also, all of the music in the original Unreal Tournament was .S3Ms and .MODs, IIRC, but Brandon and van den Bos did such a good job that hardly anybody cares.

edit:

Wikipedia said:

Two additional tracks were contributed: one ("firebr.umx") by Tero "Teque" Kostermaa and Kai-Eerik "Nitro" Komppa, and one ("razor-ub.umx") by Peter "Skaven" Hajba.

nice tie in to the conversation :D

This post has been edited by Lachesis: 23 January 2010 - 05:12 PM

[ThDPro]

exo said:

Get back to me when you convince an orchestra to compose music for your game. Orchestrated music might have its perks but so does music custom tailored for the game at hand.

Yeah, I know it's a ridiculous notion, but still the option isn't really present unless you want to clog up your zip file with 20 fold the space the game takes up. (which is not necessarily the worst thing that could happen.)

CJA said:

Listen: it strikes me as ridiculous to use Cubase Pro or FL Studio 17 to make music for a GCS from 199X. Enjoy your piano rolls!

Yes, it is ridiculous. But, I honestly prefer to make music in Sonar, Logic, or Pro Tools. Implementing it into games is the ridiculous part. (Imagine a bunch of facey characters solving a mystery about Guys maggots to the sound of an orchestral overture... That's a bad example. That would be great, but you see what i mean.)

On another note of what cja said, MIDI would be pretty bloody cool. That would make my day.

CJA said:

Anyway, tracker music is an actual genre, as much as chiptune is, because of its distinctive feel. If you render a track to an MP3, it (supposedly) doesn't become "real music," so in order to support your point you're going to have to draw the line here:

What is "real music?" Why is "real music" better? Is "real music" more available and does it net a better result overall, considering musicians of any experience level?

Tracker music is real music. I implied otherwise, and that was folly.

I never said "real music" is better for mzx, but I see where you're coming from. My definition of "real music" was more than a little hasty. There's plenty of great sounding music for games that I realize can only really be classified as "real music," and, like I said above, it probably works better than any orchestral track we could feed a game in most, if not all cases. (not to mention, I don't see anyone composing any sheet music for an orchestra, hiring an orchestra & engineer & studio time, ect. in the near future of mzx... But that would be pretty cool if someone did.)

I just hate trackers. The interface is emotionless and dry, but that's just me. I'm an analog guy, really. (analog as in, the signal being recorded, not as in recording sound to tape.) I think there is really no reason to change the way we do music in mzx. I like most of the music I hear, so why change that?

[Seventh Shade]

Yeah, megazeux has needed variable sound volumes at the very least for some time now. Active music would be incredible.

[KKairos]

If Cubase can render things to a WAV (which could then very easily be OGGified) then your problem is solved.
If it can't then...why the heck did you pay money for a music program that can't output to WAV?

[RyanThunder]

I'm still waiting for separate volume controls in MegaZeux, instead of just one universal one. For example:

mod volume 255
sam volume 255

[Sai'ke]

RyanThunder, on Jan 23 2010, 08:49 PM, said:

I'm still waiting for separate volume controls in MegaZeux, instead of just one universal one. For example:

mod volume 255
sam volume 255

Or even better :o

set "channel1vol" 255

I don't know if the desire for such a feature would warrant spending a lot of time on it though. Especially not with all the plans of the drastic changes to robotic and whatnot.

[KKairos]

Sai'ke when you say channel1 are you thinking like channel 1 of a MOD, so you could control which instruments play and which don't?

[RyanThunder]

KKairos, on Jan 23 2010, 04:05 PM, said:

Sai'ke when you say channel1 are you thinking like channel 1 of a MOD, so you could control which instruments play and which don't?

Yea, if that's the case you can do something like the new Zelda: Spirit Tracks did, and dynamically play more instruments in the overworld theme as your train goes faster, or vice versa. I'm pretty sure that there are plenty of other games that do this with their music too.

This post has been edited by RyanThunder: 23 January 2010 - 10:12 PM