Song preview?

[ranzq]

Is it possible to bind 'yellow' for preview songs like in fofix?

[David]

We are limited with buttons as Yellow on a drumkit also acts as UP.
We may allow for a preview once a song has been highlighted for more than 2 seconds.

Thanks
David

[raynebc]

FoF uses a separate OGG for the preview, but Rock Band uses a start time (at least for RBN2, all song previews are 30 seconds). I was wondering if Phase Shift will just support one or if it will eventually allow either?

The separate OGG method is probably easier for the game, as the chart author would have to create it to handle any desired fade in and fade out, but it takes a bit more hard drive space. I'd also have to come up with an efficient way for EOF make the preview OGG. I would probably have to have it decode the entire chart into memory to get the raw PCM samples, package a WAV file and encode it to OGG.

The start (and hopefully stop) preview time method would be easier for the charter, but more work for the game. Hopefully Microsoft's audio API would make this relatively simple, but I don't know.

[asskickulater]

im not a fan of the preview.ogg, its eats up un needed hard drive space *lacks HDD space*

[David]

Well the trouble is that phase shift supports so many stems now that it's becoming quite hard to load them all quickly.
Currently it's possible to have 12 stems loaded at once.

drums.ogg - Full Drum Mix
rhythm.ogg - Bass Guitar / Rhythm Guitar
guitar.ogg - Guitar / Coop Guitar
keys.ogg - Keys
song.ogg - All Other Song Audio
crowd.ogg - Crowd Audio
vocals_1.ogg - Lead Vocals
vocals_2.ogg - Backing Vocals
drums_1.ogg - Kick Drum
drums_2.ogg - Snare Drum
drums_3.ogg - Cymbals
drums_4.ogg - Toms

As such I don't think I'd be able to preview them fast enough to make them usefull.

So the preview.ogg might be the only way to handle this nicely.

Thanks
David

[vandorb12]

David
raynebc
If you decide to go with a preview setting in the song.ini file, that would be great.
But if you do, please allow legacy support for preview.ogg

[raynebc]

Makes sense to me. It'll eventually be added to EOF, but I'll consider it a higher priority when Phase Shift adds preview support.

[asskickulater]

what about have it use mixing stems as a back up in case it doesn't find a preview.ogg?

[vandorb12]

May 29, 2011 22:17:51 GMT asskickulater said:

what about have it use mixing stems as a back up in case it doesn't find a preview.ogg?

FoFiX already does this. As such, it should be a de-facto feature once previews are implemented.

The developers are thinking about adding on some song.ini tags to make a start section and an end section using the audio stems to create a preview, and not a "preview.ogg" for a preview.

However, this is just speculation from just looking at recent messages on the thread, not the actual views of the devs.

[David]

OK, I've done a little work on this tonight and managed to get the preview working to a reasonable standard. The load time seems OK, taking about a second to load on my machine. I've got it to load all stems and jump 20% into the song when there is no preview.ogg found.

Just have a few bugs with syncing the song as I'm jumping into it and it's hard to seek exactly on multiple files. So far it's been OK, only found a couple of songs where the stems have drifted slightly. I think it'll be fine for a preview anyway.

I've got it fading in nicely but I've just got to decide exactly how to handle the normal menu music when I get to the song screen. I'm debating if the music should fade down the instant you enter the song menu or if it should wait till you've highlighted your first song.

All this aside hopefully this will be in the next release.

I can add support for a start time but does anyone know if there is a song.ini tag defined for this already?


Thanks
David

[raynebc]

It doesn't look like FoFiX itself uses such a tag yet, but they mention that Performous uses a "preview_start_time" tag:
code.google.com/p/fofix/wiki/SongINIInstructions

A good reciprocating tag would be "preview_end_time", following the same naming convention of FoFiX's video start/stop tags.

RB3 charts use the following tag:
('preview' start_time stop_time)

I suppose either would work pretty well for this purpose.

[Bluzer]

May 29, 2011 20:22:25 GMT David said:

Well the trouble is that phase shift supports so many stems now that it's becoming quite hard to load them all quickly.
Currently it's possible to have 12 stems loaded at once.

drums.ogg - Full Drum Mix
rhythm.ogg - Bass Guitar / Rhythm Guitar
guitar.ogg - Guitar / Coop Guitar
keys.ogg - Keys
song.ogg - All Other Song Audio
crowd.ogg - Crowd Audio
vocals_1.ogg - Lead Vocals
vocals_2.ogg - Backing Vocals
drums_1.ogg - Kick Drum
drums_2.ogg - Snare Drum
drums_3.ogg - Cymbals
drums_4.ogg - Toms

As such I don't think I'd be able to preview them fast enough to make them usefull.

So the preview.ogg might be the only way to handle this nicely.

Thanks
David

I think you can get rid of the vocals_2.ogg cause I haven't see a single song(in RB3[or in the DLC's]) that had the backing..it was all mixed together into the vocals_1.ogg

[David]

Yea, but I think I'll leave it in for possible future customs songs.

Thanks
David

[vandorb12]

Jun 1, 2011 3:32:26 GMT raynebc said:

It doesn't look like FoFiX itself uses such a tag yet, but they mention that Performous uses a "preview_start_time" tag:
code.google.com/p/fofix/wiki/SongINIInstructions

A good reciprocating tag would be "preview_end_time", following the same naming convention of FoFiX's video start/stop tags.

RB3 charts use the following tag:
('preview' start_time stop_time)

I suppose either would work pretty well for this purpose.

For a fallback option, one should implement a 30 second timer for said preview if there is a "preview_start_time" tag, but no "preview_end_time" tag in the song.ini file.
As the logic flows, this will prevent Phase Shift from playing the song all the way to the end.

[raynebc]

That's a good idea. RBN forces a preview window of 30 seconds, but the tag in the DTA file appears to indicate how long the preview is.