How could this sound format be missed?! in BYOND Discussion

ID:134940
 
Jun 26 2005, 9:35 am
MP3!!!! I see every other format except MP3... that hurts. If I could play some MP3's on my games it would be crazy! Please support this format as the songs aren't normaly HUGE like .wavs. What's everyone elses opinion?
#1 Jun 26 2005, 9:42 am (Edited on Jun 26 2005, 10:11 am)
There are plenty of .mp3 to .ogg converters out there -- use one. =)

BYOND has no support for the .mp3 format because of licensing issues.
#2 Jun 26 2005, 9:44 am
In response to Wizkidd0123 (#1)
Licensing issues? What do you mean? People using MP3 Music from cds?
#3 Jun 26 2005, 9:56 am
#4 Jun 26 2005, 7:13 pm
In response to Stevenw9 (#2)
It costs money to get the decoder for MP3 files. So, essentially, it would cost a fair bit of money to add the ability to play MP3s.
#5 Jun 26 2005, 10:20 pm
In response to Wizkidd0123 (#1)
As other people have said... MP3 was not missed, it was deliberately excluded because of the licencing fees.

Wizkidd0123 wrote:
There are plenty of .mp3 to .ogg converters out there -- use one. =)

dbPowerAmp is a good one, though you need to download a plugin so that it can read/write OGG files.
#6 Jun 27 2005, 9:03 am
In response to Wizkidd0123 (#1)
Wizkidd0123 wrote:
There are plenty of .mp3 to .ogg converters out there -- use one. =)

Or better yet, don't. Converting from a lossy format to a lossy format is a lousy idea, unless there's some form of lossless conversion between formats (which for all I know could be possible). Better to start with the source material and re-encode.

Lummox JR
#7 Jun 27 2005, 9:06 am
In addition to the other comments on this thread, I'd like to add that FMOD's music support is much much better than mere .mp3 will give you. There are a lot of Mod files out there, which consist not just of the .mod format, but also .it, .s3m, .xm, and others. A Mod is basically like MIDI except with sound samples included for the instruments so it doesn't sound like crap.

FMOD also supports the hybrid .oxm format, which is basically an .xm file with the samples stored in compressed Ogg-Vorbis format. There's a link to a converter from the fmod.org site.

The main trick for 3.5 and up is gonna be finding Mod files that are free to use in games. The MegaZeux community, which has been using Mods for much longer, may be able to give us some insight on that.

Lummox JR
#8 Jun 28 2005, 5:57 am
In response to Lummox JR (#7)
Not to mention that mp3 format uses an average of at least 2 MB... the upload and the download of that would lag a server to death.

Anyone under a connection speed of 512kb/s would suffer badly.
#9 Jun 28 2005, 6:11 am
In response to Tiberath (#8)
Only if they store the resources on the same server that the world is being hosted from. You can set it up so that resources are downloaded from a different location, which is very good if you've got some webspace that doesn't have bandwidth limits.