[RuneLancer]

Well, I suppose it's my turn to seek the Wisdom of RPGDX. :)

I've loosely been thinking about how to handle the music/sound in Endless Saga. Not being a composer by a long shot, I figured the best I could hope for is using videogame midis... at least until I could find something better for the game's music. But MIDI == crap unless you have a killer sound card that can render them like some insane orchestrated masterpiece... and even then few people have cards like that. (If I went MP3/OGG, I'd be dealing with 1-3 megs per song... a lil' too big for my tastes considering the rather large length of the game.)

So I figured I'd do a little something: make my own format that loosely mimics MIDI but allows the use of external wav-based instruments. Then I'd be sure to deliver my players decent quality music. Then I figured, meh, screw that, I'll just use MOD since it's close enough to what I want. :P

Along came a composer. A rather talented one at that. To boot, this guy composes in MOD natively. Looks like the question of what I'll use to play music is settled once and for all!

I know there are a few libraries out there that can play MOD, but music is one thing I've really inexperienced with. OpenAL sounds tempting but I'm not sure if it can play MOD. All's I've ever used was DirectMusic and WMP's OCX control.

To boot, I need something that won't chew up the sound card completely. That is, something that would allow me to play sounds at the same time. Granted, this is more of a Win95-era problem, but MOD IS a pretty dated format. ;)

So... I'm all ears. What are the options? :)
_________________
Endless Saga
An OpenGL RPG in the making. Now with new hosting!

[Rainer Deyke]

I am using FMOD. It does everything I need it to do, it's free if your game is free, and it's not too ridiculously expensive if your game isn't free. One of its nicer features is support for xm files with ogg-compressed samples, aka oxm.

I previously used SDL_mixer, but I switched to FMOD because of latency issues and because SDL_mixer tends to crash when more than one music file is kept in memory at the same time.

[Ninkazu]

The only way to get MOD-type songs to work with OpenAL is to pick apart OpenMPT and figure out how to work with the files, mutate the wave data and then OAL comes in with rendering the pcm data. Quite a bit of work I don't think anyone has tried yet.

[RuneLancer]

Well, picking apart openAL isn't something I'd want to try. Like I said, my experience with music and sound is quite limited, so I'd rather not get myself in way over my head and waste a few months fiddling with this. ;)

I'll give FMOD a look. I think all's I'll need is basic playback and being able to loop the songs (the guy composing Endless Saga's music has sent me samples that loop quite well, so nothing fancy should be necessary to assure seamly playback I suppose.) Control over the volume (for fade in/fade out effects) would be cool too, but that's basic enough so I doubt it'd be a problem.

Thanks, I'll give FMOD a look. :)
_________________
Endless Saga
An OpenGL RPG in the making. Now with new hosting!

[Nodtveidt]

un4seen's Bass is another good one worth looking at. And of course, there's always DUMB, which can be used with OpenAL.
_________________
If you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear demonic voices. The scary part is that if you play it forwards it installs Windows. - wallace