In-game mp3 player

[MirceaKitsune]

Was wondering what everyone thinks about having such a feature someday. I'm thinking something like the UT2k4 music player... we all know it's much nicer to be able to play listening to your own songs and albums rather then the same map music (which I'm not saying is bad but sometimes you may just want your own stuff). The music in the engine is already ogg based I think so all that would be needed would be an in-game popup menu to allow specifying external audio files and making a playlist with them.

It is of course known you can listen to your music with Winamp or something else running in the background separately, but there are many disadvantages to that. You need to setup and tweak your music player in the background every time and abandon the game to do that (unless you have some confusing shortcuts to change songs and the like, and if your PC is lower end switching to windows and back might take vital time from your match), the music player also uses more CPU and memory running together with the game, you need to re-tweak the game and music player's volume each time to hear both the sounds and music correctly together (and disable the music in the game every time from settings) and other things. Anyway how do you feel about having an in-game mp3 (and ogg) music player where you can make your own playlists and listen to them instead of the map music? Do you believe such a feature would be nice?

[[-z-]]

Not possible under the GPL. Besides, it's a waste of processing power.

Perhaps an interface to your player... but even that I wouldn't consider a priority. If you can find us more QuakeC coders... maybe this can happen.

[MirceaKitsune]

Not possible under the GPL. Besides, it's a waste of processing power.

Hmm why not? The music player technology doesn't have any global licenses or anything like that as far as I know. And I thought it wouldn't waste any extra processing power at all since the client plays music either way and the technology is the same. My idea was just a window to allow selecting music manually from the hard drive, so what difference does it make if it processes a mp3 selected manually instead of the ogg in data.pk3? Just curious as I thought that should technically be possible with a small patch or even from the console

[[-z-]]

Well I figured since Ubuntu requires an extra package to process them, Nexuiz would follow suit. I'm not the best reference for licensing related questions so I suppose it was unfair for me to say such a definite "not possible". Perhaps someone could clarify this.

However, I still don't think Nexuiz should be the one doing the processing but rather pipes a command to your player.

[RoKenn]

Well I figured since Ubuntu requires an extra package to process them, Nexuiz would follow suit. I'm not the best reference for licensing related questions so I suppose it was unfair for me to say such a definite "not possible". Perhaps someone could clarify this.

That's because mp3 is patent-stricken: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mp3#Licensing_and_patent_issues

If you integrate mp3 into Nexuiz the distributions won't integrate it into their distro anymore but just provide a "you find it there, install at your own legal risks".

I assume though it would be ok to look if a certain mp3 library is installed and link it if it is present.

[MirceaKitsune]

Wow... never really imagined such a common format as mp3 could possibly have such limits. There are so many free players around who can play mp3 files... Anyway I seen there are some open-source mp3 decoders out there so maybe we can just use one if it's safe for the devs (the community really wouldn't have how to get into trouble about it since the game is free and open to download by anyone so if the devs wouldn't get into issues id say that shouldn't be much a problem but I dunno). From what I knew no one cares what you make unless you steal something from someone else, though with all the legal misery on the net these days who can know any more Hope some way may still find to make a player anyway...

[[-z-]]

Coding this in quakec sounds, harder and more resource intensive than coding an interface.

[Ed]

This is getting a bit off topic but why support MP3 when Darkplaces uses Ogg natively which is not patent encumbered and doesn't date from the 1980's?

MP3 is another unfortunate example of where people don't understand compressed formats. Please, if you really for whatever reason want to encode in MP3, don't let me catch you using 192Kbps or greater, it just is not intended for high quality. For that you should be using MP2 which is intended for high quality lossy compression. The DVD Forum had 192Kbps to play with and they chose MP2. Good on them.

Encode everything in Ogg, then you won't have any problems.

[MirceaKitsune]

This is getting a bit off topic but why support MP3 when Darkplaces uses Ogg natively which is not patent encumbered and doesn't date from the 1980's?

MP3 is another unfortunate example of where people don't understand compressed formats. Please, if you really for whatever reason want to encode in MP3, don't let me catch you using 192Kbps or greater, it just is not intended for high quality. For that you should be using MP2 which is intended for high quality lossy compression. The DVD Forum had 192Kbps to play with and they chose MP2. Good on them.

Encode everything in Ogg, then you won't have any problems.

I know ogg is better then mp3 and I like it much more then it. However mp3 is the most commonly used format, that's the only reason I care about it. 95% of the music you find and have around these days are still mp3, though there will probably be better days when ogg will replace that.

Either way, what would you think about an ogg only player in this case? A popup menu to only allow selecting external ogg's and allow making them playlists, listening in-game and all that list? That would really require no extra implementation other then the menu and code to play separately selected files... Could be an idea