Music in BoD (Bike or Die!)

[Music in BoD] oh, i didn't know the realplayer is so bad at low quali...

Sz — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 17:32:20 +0000

oh, i didn't know the realplayer is so bad at low quality mp3.
it would mean i cannot rely on the built-in decoder
(and i won't probably supply my own one, because of the licensing/patent issues)

so... long live MOD music!

[Music in BoD] Yea i guess it would be hard for mp3s, unless we had so...

mike flips — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 04:32:57 +0000

Yea i guess it would be hard for mp3s, unless we had some sort of quality reducing program

Its good you arent worrying about the music now, you've been working hard enough

[Music in BoD] On the Tapwave Zodiac, you can play low-quality MP3s wi...

Kristopher — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:06:35 +0000

On the Tapwave Zodiac, you can play low-quality MP3s without much of a slowdown, but I remember with Real Player on the Zire 72s, playing low-quality MP3s actually caused the games to stop about every two seconds- it was worse for performance than playing high-quality. It was probably inefficient software.

BTW, for MODs, I like Bee, Unlimited, and Checknobankh, although they don't seem to fit with this game.

[Music in BoD] the fundamental question is: should the game come with ...

Sz — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 00:55:19 +0000

the fundamental question is: should the game come with its own music or assume that everyone plays their favorite mp3 tracks in the background anyway?

BoD for Zodiac is the compromise: it uses the Zodiac API to play the mp3 files found on the device, which is something between the built-in music and the standard background mp3 player (the playback is controlled by the game, which means you can e.g. assign specific tracks to levels)
nowadays this could be easily extended to other mp3-capable Palms.

as you noticed in another thread, mp3 decoding is bad for performance (not just real player, basically all players would have similar performance on a given device). this can be alleviated by lowering the bitrate and/or playing mono instead of the standard 128kbps/stereo (i.e. reducing the sound quality)

or, i could dump mp3 completely and use another, not so CPU-hungry format, e.g. MOD like i did in Arcade Reality. this is also good for the file size (unlike mp3), but reduces the choice of the music (you cannot just convert any music recording into mod, it has to be composed in the tracker or converted from midi).

anyway, i won't be adding any music in v1.5, this version is sufficiently delayed already