Winamp Controls?

[Extremepumpkin]

I was thinking, since quite a few windows users use winamp while playing games etc for music, perhaps Winamp controls could be implamented (play, pause, next, prev, stop etc)... I know a few other OSS projects have done it, perhaps you could snip the code of them?

[utilae]

Yeah, the ability to listen to your own music (like mp3s) is something that all games should have, like a built in mp3 player. On, Need For Speed Underground they have a thing were when a song plays, the artist and song pop up, which is cool.

[Daveybaby]

Or you could always, i dunno, run winamp in the background or something.

[leiavoia]

the problem here is that sound streams don't always mix. For instance, if i run a media player, it hogs the soundcard and other programs (games) will not have sound as a result (at least on my system). So if i wanted to run my own music with the game's sound FX (a good combo), i could not do that. You would have to play the music from withing the game and mix the sound streams together to get it to work.

[pd]

i think this depends on your soundcard, it simply doensn't seem to support multiple channels

[iamrobk]

I know I have a REALLY POS soundcard (it's a SoundBlaster Live! Value, basically the cheap version of a bad soundcard released in like, 1998), but it supports multi-channel (or whatever that is) sound, cause I run iTunes int he backround a lot when I play games........no offense, but your soundcard must REALLY suck........

[guiguibaah]

An interesting tidbit of info about the soundblaster live. The maximum number of polyphonic notes it could handle at once were 256, while the maximum amount of soundfont (patch) memory it could handle was 32 megs.

The Audigy and the Audigy 2, however, have been toned down to 64 polyphonic notes, but they now bank into system memory to allow much larger soundfonts. You could load better soundfonts... but have less instruments playing.

Dunno why SB limited the Audigy's to 64, seems a little odd. Oh well.

- - -

As for Music, I have an argument for and against it - If you just have winamp playing in the background, it won't change or react to certain events. If you were to zoom into a planet view and the sound effect of the planet's atmosphere plays, it may be drowned out by the music. The more 'musically talented' games will reduce the music track by 50% so that the music is not competing for aureal focus when these events happen..

This is especially important when there's speach - such as diplomatic speach stuff, or adventure game speak.

EX: In Monkey Island 4, whenever you had to talk to someone, the music qould quiet down by half, making it easier to hear what the other person had to say. Once the conversation was over, the music track went back to 100% (of what it was set at).

- - -

Now the downside, is that I don't know if there's some sort of licensing fee for using an .mp3 ingame player. I know that all the game music is supposed to be in .ogg format. I am not familiar with .mp3 players in that regard, so maybe someone with a background in software can let us know.

[Daveybaby]

Dunno why SB limited the Audigy's to 64, seems a little odd. Oh well.

Because 256 was overkill. 99.9% of people just had no use for it. Kinda like ATI's recent decision to remove pixelshader3 support from their newest cards - nobody is actually using it, so why not devote that silicon to something more useful?

Now the downside, is that I don't know if there's some sort of licensing fee for using an .mp3 ingame player. I know that all the game music is supposed to be in .ogg format. I am not familiar with .mp3 players in that regard, so maybe someone with a background in software can let us know.

Absolutely, the last thing you want in an open source project is mp3 code. However, i dont think that would be a problem to w.r.t. remote controlling a third party app like winamp.

[Ablaze]

It wouldn't be hard to have a button which posted the play, fast forward, and rewind windows messages. That way the game wouldn't be using any specific player.. just telling any player that happened to be playing when to change songs.

[darq]

there are more players than winamp
you'd have to implement xmms or mplayer on linux
or <insert macos eqivalent> on mac

Or you could always, i dunno, run winamp in the background or something.