If I want to have synchronization of my visual effects to the background music as I understand it the best way is to analyze the background music offline, add time markers and parse this marker file from XNA. My question is if anyone know the easiest approach to generate this marker file?

Ideally I would prefer a free program that visualizes the music so I can add markers and export these to a text file. Does something like that exist? I know this isn't specifically an XNA question but maybe someone could give a hint anyway.

I have finally found a good solution to my problem and I guess it would be ok to share it with anyone who stumble on this thread.

After a lot of googling I found a free audio editor program named Audacity and it does everything I was looking for.

It can visualize the music and I can add markers that can be named individually and exported to a text file. It can even auto detect the music beat and add markers itself. As an added bonus it can generate its own beat that I can export to WAV for test purposes. All in all what I was looking for.

Hey GucciHat,

This sounds like good stuff.  I was already aware of Audacity, although I've never used that feature.  I'm currently doing some R&D on a game and I wanted to sync game content to music.  Do you think this audacity pipeline is the best way to go?  I've looked over the forums and others seem to have trouble with the realtime calculations and application thing, so what I'm seeing is that doing it manually like you did might be best.  My problem is that I wanted to (preferably) have it so the gamers could plug in a playlist of their own MP3s and have content procedurally generated by their own music.  Also I'm interested in how you might be parsing that data, although I'll have to look over the output from Audacity, and maybe I can figure a thing or two out on my own.