Ramping up to submit my first game in a few weeks; trying to add music now, and I have a few questions.  This may be better suited toward the 'audio' section, but the first question seems more 'licensing' than development related.

(1) Understanding that you're not a lawyer and what you say isn't legal advice, does anyone know anything about MP3 licensing in regard to XNA?  I know I can *play* MP3s, but I've been reading things about MP3 licenses and what-not.  Some tech (ala Flash) I believe has MP3 playing covered, but I don't know what the deal is with XNA.  I can't find anything in the EULA or online (near every post I've found is from a time when XNA couldn't even play MP3s), which leads me to suspect that the burden is on me.  Has anyone run into this yet?  It seems like I may be better off just finding a WAV converter and taking the file size hit.

(2) Does anyone have any experience with SoundEffect under the hood?  IE: When I load a SoundEffect using the ContentManager, will it be cached?  I notice a bit of jerkiness whenever my sounds play, and I'm not sure of everything going on when XNA 'creates a new SoundEffectInstance.'  I suspect it is properly cached, a SoundEffectInstance is lightweight, and the jerkiness is caused elsewhere.  But I'd like to be sure.

(3) Is there a concrete, official guide to XNA Indy Games requirements?  I've found some unofficial sounding posts (a 'best practices' page and a page on 'evil test practices') but nothing that lays out everything plainly.

Thanks,
--Brian

1) Prefixing a legal question with that doesn't make it not a legal question. If you want to know about licensing MP3, ask a lawyer.

That said, you aren't actually playing an MP3 in XNA GS. The content pipeline actually converts your MP3 to a WMA at build time and then you are playing a WMA file at runtime. You're more than welcome to check with a lawyer as to whether that requires you to get a license or not if that sort of thing worries you.

2) ContentManager caches all content loaded through. Two calls to Content.Load with the same asset name (without clearing or disposing the manager, of course) will yield two references to the same object.

3) The FAQs, the Best Practices, and the Evil Checklist are the guides to XBLIG review. Follow all of them.

(1) Agreed; the preface was intended to indicate I wouldn't take what you said as legal advice, regardless of what was said, but in retrospect it still sounds like asking for legal advice.  At any rate, I wasn't sure if perhaps Microsoft had written something somewhere (ie: a license agreement I hadn't seen).

(2) Got it, thanks.

(3) Fair enough, I suppose.  Thanks again.