For our next release, one of of the things we're investigating is the ability to play raw sound buffers. (Caveat: we're not promising anything; still investigating.) This would allow you to play PCM data directly, without using XACT or a wav file.

I'm curious: those of you that have asked for this functionality, what exactly would you use it for? What kind of game would you make? I'm trying to get an idea of what scenarios to keep in mind as we look at this.

The most common scenarios that have been raised in these forums are:

1. Ability to implement newer and better compression algorithms e.g. there is already c# ogg vorbis decoders

2. Ability to port/write tracker/mod type music which is very space efficient. Lots of people would love to see an Fmod wrapper that we can use... maybe providing that would be an alternative.

3. General procedural music generation algorithms...

 

My main motivation for this request is to enable the use of different codecs for background music or using other means to generate music.

- Hability to create audio giving a situation on the game, I would like to be able to provide a library for sound phisics simulation.

- To manipulate an audio source and do real time manipulation of it, for example create a Karaoke game that connects to your MP3/WMA collection and "Lowers/mutes" human voice.

- To manipulate voice from players over Xbox Live and try to make them sound like the real caracter from the game/movie.

 

I have had the following needs:

1) For soundtracks for in-game movies. Yes, this requires that I be able to do video and audio decoding in C#, but that's not impossible.

2) For real-time processing of sounds in ways that XAudio doesn't give you. For example, different formant shift or reverberation algorithms.


I can also see the following as "low hanging fruit":

3) Real-time synthesized game music. A few mini-moog simulators and a beatbox are pretty easy to code up, and you can do interesting things with context-specific algorithmic music.

4) Doing music-based games, like Guitar Hero.

jwatte:

Real-time synthesized game music. A few mini-moog simulators and a beatbox are pretty easy to code up, and you can do interesting things with context-specific algorithmic music.

Yes, I second this need. I took a look at the source for sfxr (a simple game sound fx generator) and the sound generator function is simple enough that it could probably run in real time. Even if it wasn't real time, the sounds could be generated very quickly to provide many different sounds at run time. It would be ideal if these sounds could then be hooked up to XACT, so we could generate a load of source wavs at run time that could still be used in XACT sound banks.

the sound generator function is simple enough that it could probably run in real time

You are greatly underestimating the performance of modern CPUs. If you use one of the cores for audio, you can easily play a 32-note polyphonic song with virtual analog synths, plus modulated sample playback for the rythm section, plus EQ and other effects, including a real-time convolution for reverb. And this is using .NET -- if you hand-coded it in SSE, you'd get a lot (a lot!) more than.

Sound buffer access like managed directx had would be great and tons of people have asked for it and filed connect suggestions.

With all of the music games out there, getting access to the sound buffer would be GREAT!!  If we are able to add pure audio files to our projects now instead of XACT files, it would greaty extend the audio side of our games.  Please do this!  :)

I guess you ppl forgot, to imagine something. RenderTargets. If implement DSP with GPU in mind... you can easily break through CPU .NET overhead. heh... and I guess that would be nice to see some basic sequencer on xbox 360 xbla (Music 2000 on PS was actually an icon of it's times).

I personally just wish to make simple Compressor/Limiter/Expander effect. There is no such in XACT... but I need one.

Edit: Of course I wish to be able to generate sound buffers on fly (before lvl's or smth). I am a minimalistic electronic music producer... I just love this stuff.

Lupychica:

With all of the music games out there, getting access to the sound buffer would be GREAT!!  If we are able to add pure audio files to our projects now instead of XACT files, it would greaty extend the audio side of our games.  Please do this!  :)

Do which? Direct access to the sound buffer, or support for adding pure audio files to your projects? These are not the same thing!

I think this may be the last piece of the puzzle before an Xbox Media Player is possible.  Decoding video was always a possibility, but audio was a problem.  With access to raw sound buffers and system link, you could write a media player.  Use system link as a bridge to your computer to stream media files, and then decode and play on the Xbox.  I wonder if you could get h.264 decoding fast enough on the Xbox with C#.  Anyone care to try? :)

Its not something you could distribute on Community Games, but it would be a nice app for CC members.