Flexible Personal Music Jukebox

[lonnarin]

The first few tracks I've heard for the official soundtrack are great, however, I've always been a fan of games that allow some soundtrack or soundbyte flexibility for adding and removing one's own customized selection. In particular, Civ IV uses this method somewhat in its ability to go into the options menu and select your own MP3 directory to play through the scenario. Warcraft II had a similar customization ability, though mainly for voices of units, but it was fun assigning your own voices for different things with the nice customizing interface it had. NWN kind of steered away from this, for despite the files being easy to convert with a program, all the music files were lumped together in one huge directory for all the battle, exploration and night/day tracks in one big place, which makes it cumbersome to switch out custom music. Despite this, I've made about 4 seperate themed soundtracks for NWN that I have backed up on a DVDR somewhere, that I can copy out the main music directory and swap in new files for the celtic/braveheart theme, the classic rock and heavy metal themes, the utterly dark blackmetal mix of doom theme, and the assorted squaresoft/final fantasy/capcom themes when the mood fits me.

I was wondering what the file format of the soundtrack will be, if it will be standard MP3 that would be easy to play around with making custom tracks, or if it will be structured like some of the modern games with a huge compressed database in one big file.

Personally, I would enjoy if the soundtrack files were sorted in more seperate seperate folders per the area/situation for easier file sorting/swapping, and for them to be in an easily accessable format for not only importing custom files, but being able to burn a personal audio cd for them and listen on the way to work. Many of the Activision games like Vampire: Bloodlines and Scarface: The World is Yours had easy to access soundtrack libraries in MP3 format, and I know those soundtracks inside and out from listening to them outside the game. Conversely, I can easily hop into the directory via explorer and see what I'm dealing with when I can add in my own custom tracks.

I could technically just mute the music in game via the options menu and run winamp in the background, but that gets annoying for three main issues. 1) winamp causes crashes in the main game from time to time and makes NWN more unstable than without, 2) you always have to hit Alt-Tab or the Windows key to skip tracks and such, and 3) When you have a seperate media player outside the program doing the custom soundtrack, often times the context of the mood is lost. In other words, there's no real transition of mood between battle music and exploration music, night and day music, just one long playlist that feels detached from the action. Whenever I switch out my custom soundtracks using that mp3->NWN convertor and structure the theme of the sound library, then I can do things like make the extra aggressive songs for battle, the calmer and more ambient tracks for caves and graveyards, the lilting celtic jigs for small cities, etc.

If in addition to easy to access and modify soundtrack file libraries, there was ALSO an in-game MP3 jukebox of sorts like how GTA3 for PC handled the custom radio channel, than one could raise and lower volume, skip tracks, etc, that would add some enjoyment to the layperson who doesn't typically explore installation files. Conversely, a jukebox explorer would allow people to click around and sample the already awesome sounding stock soundtrack within.

[OneST8]

Sorry I didn't notice this thread earlier as it's actually something I can talk about without giving anything significant away

Music
The music format for the game will be Ogg Vorbis. This is due to the licensing restrictions of the MP3 format. Ogg Vorbis is as free as it gets, provides excellent quality sound and there are many freely available conversion tools to be found on the 'net. Adding MP3 support is a possibility post-release when we may actually be able to afford the licensing expenses, however; even if the fees are minuscule I for some reason feel that the money could better be spent elsewhere... like on textures, models and animations.

Music Manager
As for the jukebox, this will most likely not make it for release but we do intend on there being some form of playlist manager (that can reference external Oggs) and will include basic mixer controls (mute/unmute/volume).