Audio/XACT

Problems with background music

shreya — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 05:07:52 GMT

hi!
when i place the code soundbank.playcue(" file name"); in load content method for background music. it is playing for a few seconds when the game starts and is stopped. How can i play the background music through out the game? If anyone knows the solution please post here.

Adding Background Music to Beginner's Guide to 2D Games

SoldierJAW — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 20:30:53 GMT

Hello,

I have just completed all of the Beginner's Guide to 2D Games (including Extra Credit - Community Tutorials) and I was wondering if someone could teach me (please don’t just link me to another site) how to just add a simple background music which loops as the game plays (i.e. have an AC/DC song play or something).

I am new to coding and C# and I hope someone here would be kind enough to help me.

Thanks.

XACT freezes VS build

LotusXP — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:03:48 GMT

I've been running into a problem recently where XACT freezes visual studio when xWMA compression is enabled for both the PC and XBox.

I wrote an article detailing the problem and how to work around it here, just in case someone else runs into the same issue.

Problem changing the BGM.

HeadShot — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:06:49 GMT

Im new to this audio thing so just keep that in mind :). I am trying to make it so the background track will change each time you increase in level. Here is my current code that i thought would work.

if (stopSpawning && blocks.Count == 0)

{

++level;

stopSpawning = false;

trackCue.Stop(AudioStopOptions.Immediate);

trackCue = soundBank.GetCue(levels[level].TrackName);

trackCue.Play();

curMilli = 0;

}

but whats happening is that the old music doesn't stop and the new music begins.

Also the same code worked for when i switched from the menu to the first level music.

Please help me,

Thanks.

XAudio2 Streaming and Clicks at End of Stream

Pdimples — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:55:55 GMT

Hi all,

So I'm working on modding Half-life 2 to use XAudio2 instead of the built in audio engine, so I can add effects, custom rolloff curves etc. Should be pretty neat when it's done.

Anyway, I have a basic streaming thread setup. I've allocated three buffers of the same length for each voice, and use OnBufferEnd callbacks to walk through the wave file I'm streaming. So far so good, it plays the entire wav file. When I reach the last buffer, I pad the unused end of the buffer with zeros and set the XAUDIO2_END_OF_STREAM flag and submit the buffer. However, I ultimately end up hearing a click after that final buffer is submitted.

Note, I am reusing the voice and buffers, but not until another file is streamed (which in this case usually isn't for a few seconds), so I don't think this is causing the click I'm experiencing.

I'm running XAudio2 with the debug flag set, but am not seeing any debug spew indicating that a discontinuity occured.

Do any of you have any suggestions as to how I can fix this problem?

Weird Sound Equalization on XBox360

Phaxan — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 15:08:10 GMT

Hello everyone,

I experience weird sound equalization with my in-game tunes, depending on the amount and type of intruments played, there are abnormal volume peaks occuring during the playback. Whether sounds are played simultanously or not doesn't resolve it ( 'Options' tune goes crazy even without any sound played together ). I played these tunes in MP3 format and WMA format within the Xbox dashboard without any volume problems. No problem detected on PC neither. For example, drums played alone in the tune are hell kicking whereas when a synth is played along , they fade drasticly. To me, it sounds like the framework tries to 'maximize/normalize' any sound played no matter the range of frequences.

I use MediaPlayer to play back the tunes, and haven't tried to use XACT yet. All my volumes ( soundeffects and mediaplayer ) are set to 1.0f.

Any idea on this ?

Understanding VisualizationData

GeeGeeNoRe — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 03:26:23 GMT

XNA’s new VisualizationData class opens up many possibilities in terms of authoring visualizations and (what I’m personally more interested in) creating music-generated gameplay. However, aside from the bundled XNA documentation, there isn’t a lot of information out there on how to use the VisualizationData class in a useful way. I will attempt to address this issue through this thread. I hope to document what I’ve learned about visualization data in a way that makes sense to the musically inclined and otherwise. If time allows, I’ll supplement my findings with code samples, links to information I’ve found around the web, and some video demos on YouTube. In the tradition of NeHe’s OpenGL tutorials that I’m sure many of us grew up on, I’ll try to keep my code as simple and clean as possible so that even novice XNA developers can understand what I’m doing. Also in that tradition, we’ll start with the very basics of getting access to a song’s visualization data and steadily progress to doing some cooler stuff with it. So let’s jump right in!

Getting Started

The VisualizationData class lives under the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media namespace. The easiest way to get started playing with visualization data is to play some music from your Windows Media Player library through the MediaPlayer, which we’ll do now. If you want to follow along, this first project is going to take you from an empty project to building your first music visualization. So create a new Windows Game (extending this to the Xbox 360 requres a little more footwork, which we’ll talk about in future posts), and insert the following code where appropriate (remember, this stuff requires XNA 3.0): (EDIT: Can't explain the formatting garbage below.)

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;}

    
            MediaLibrary mediaLibrary; 
        
            SongCollection songCollection; 
        
            VisualizationData visualizationData; 
        
            public VisualizationDataGame() 
        
            { 
        
                mediaLibrary = new MediaLibrary(); 
        
                visualizationData = new VisualizationData(); 
        
                songCollection = mediaLibrary.Songs; 
        
            }

The MediaLibrary object represents the music that’s been added to your Windows Media Player library. So before this will work, you’ll need to make sure Media Player’s detected some songs. These songs can be MP3s, WMAs, or WAVs, as long as they aren’t DRM’d. (Side note: for some reason, I can’t get MP3’s to play through XNA’s MediaPlayer on my desktop, but they work fine on my laptop. They play fine through actual media players (Windows Media Player, Zune, iTunes, WinAmp, etc.). I’ve talked to the XNA development team, and we haven’t arrived at an explanation for this behavior. But so far, my desktop is the only instance of this happening. So I’d be interested in hearing from anyone else that has this problem.) Anyway, back to the code.

The SongCollection is a list of all of the songs contained in your media library, obtained through the MediaLibrary.Songs property. We’ll use this collection to tell the MediaPlayer what to play soon. VisualizationData is the object that will contain the frequency and sample data of the currently playing song.

    
            protected override void Initialize() 
        
            { 
        
                MediaPlayer.Play(songCollection); 
        
            }

In our Initialize function, we simply tell the MediaPlayer (which is a static class, no need to instantiate it) to play all of the songs in our media library from start to finish. All that’s left is to get the visualization data:

    
            protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) 
        
            { 
        
                MediaPlayer.GetVisualizationData(visualizationData); 
        
            }

Our Update function fills the visualizationData object with the currently playing song’s frequency and sample information each frame. We need to call this each frame to keep the data up to date.

Easy stuff, right? If you were to insert this code into a new Windows game and hit the Run button, you’d see the customary cornflower blue screen and the first song in your media library playing. But this thread’s supposed to be about visualizing music, not just listening to it. So let’s get to the fun stuff.

Seeing Sounds

We can go about this one of two ways: I can try my best to explain what the frequency and sample data mean in words and hope you get it. Or we can get something on the screen for us to look at, which should make our discussion of the frequency and sample data much clearer. So let’s get through a little more code, and then we’ll talk about what we’re seeing.

The first thing you’ll want to do is open up your favorite graphics editor (mine’s Paint.NET), and create a 1x1 blank image. I called mine Blank.png. I then created a Textures subdirectory in my Content folder in my project. Place your blank image in this new subdirectory. Now we’re going to declare a new texture in our project:

    
            Texture2D texture;

Simple enough. Next, I like to stick to the common screen resolution of 1280x720. This creates a widescreen viewport on which to display our visualization data. So add the following to the game’s constructor:

    
            public VisualizationDataGame() 
        
            { 
        
                graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); 
        
                graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = 1280; 
        
                graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = 720; 
        
                graphics.ApplyChanges(); 
        
                ... 
        
            }

We’ll want to initialize the texture object in the LoadContent function, so it should look something like this:

    
            protected override void LoadContent() 
        
            { 
        
                // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures 
        
                spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); 
        
                texture = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Textures/Blank"); 
        
            }

Finally, our Draw function is where most of the work is being done. What we’re going to do is graph our frequency and sample data on the top and bottom halves of the screen, respectively.

    
            protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) 
        
            { 
        
                GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.Black); 
        
                Viewport viewport = graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport; 
        
                int x, y, width, height; 
        
                spriteBatch.Begin();

We start this function off by clearing the screen to black and declaring a few variables to make things more readable later. We then tell our sprite batch to begin drawing.

    
                for(int f = 0; f < visualizationData.Frequencies.Count; f++)  
        
                { 
        
                    x = viewport.Width * f / visualizationData.Frequencies.Count; 
        
                    y = (int)(viewport.Height / 2 - visualizationData.Frequencies[f] * viewport.Height / 2); 
        
                    width = 1; 
        
                    height = (int)(visualizationData.Frequencies[f] * viewport.Height / 2); 
        
                    spriteBatch.Draw(texture, new Rectangle(x, y, width, height), Color.White); 
        
                }

In this first loop, we iterate through each element in our frequency array. For each of these elements, we’re going to draw a lines juxtaposed left-to-right across the screen from halfway down the screen up to that frequency band’s power level (again, I’ll explain all the technical terms soon).( Technically, we’re really drawing lines from each frequency band’s power level down to halfway down the screen due to the way 2D screen coordinates are specified in SpriteBatch’s Draw method… semantics :))

    
                for (int s = 0; s < visualizationData.Samples.Count; s++) 
        
                { 
        
                    x = viewport.Width * s / visualizationData.Samples.Count; 
        
                    width = 1; 
        
                    if (visualizationData.Samples[s] > 0.0f) 
        
                    { 
        
                        y = (int)(0.75f * viewport.Height - visualizationData.Samples[s] * viewport.Height / 4); 
        
                        height = (int)(visualizationData.Samples[s] * viewport.Height / 4); 
        
                    } 
        
                    else 
        
                    { 
        
                        y = (int)(0.75f * viewport.Height);  
        
                        height = (int)(-1.0f * visualizationData.Samples[s] * viewport.Height / 4); 
        
                    } 
        
                    spriteBatch.Draw(texture, new Rectangle(x, y, width, height), Color.White); 
        
                } 
        
                spriteBatch.End(); 
        
                base.Draw(gameTime); 
        
            }

In this second loop, we iterate through each element in the sample array. However, in this case, sample values can be negative, so we have to do a little extra footwork to draw their lines since you can’t specify a line with a negative height in the SpriteBatch’s Draw function. (Later, when we convert this to 3D, this will be a lot more elegant).

And there you have it, the Hello World of music visualization! If you’ve been following along, you can build your solution and run it to watch little white lines dance along to your music. Once you get over this first sense of accomplishment, you’ll undoubtedly ask yourself what these lines mean. And we’ll explore that next. But for now, take some time to observe the visualization for yourself so that our next discussion makes sense.

If you’re lazy like me, you can download the project here (coming soon). And for the truly lethargic, you can see the results here (also coming soon).

The Science of Sound

So now that we’ve got something to look at, let’s make some sense of this visualization data. But first, a disclaimer: what you are about to read is based largely on observation and speculation. I am not on the XNA development team. I do not claim to know exactly how all this stuff works. If others know more about this stuff than I do, this is where I invite them to chime in. Now, on with the show.

If you stayed awake during Physics class, you’ll remember that sound, in its most basic form, is vibration composed of many frequencies that the human ear can detect. Different sound waves are differentiated by certain properties such as frequency, wavelength, amplitude, and so on. Whenever frequency of a soundwave changes, its difference is reflected in the sound’s pitch. Also, whenever the amplitude of a soundwave changes, its difference is reflected in the sound’s loudness.

Music visualization is driven largely by these changes in pitch and loudness. VisualizationData’s Frequencies and Samples properties give us access to this data. Each of these properties are a collection of 256 floats (so in the example above, we could have done all of the drawing with one for loop, but for readability’s sake, I kept them seperated).

Each collection of sample data gives you a snapshot (at a very low resolution) of the waveform of the currently playing song at that instant in time. The values of these elements range from -1.0 to 1.0. Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot to do with this raw data that I’ve discovered. The real magic comes from applying a Fast Fourier Transformation (FFT) to compute the frequency components that make up the sound you’re hearing. Computing the FFT involves a lot of math that I have to admit I slept through my senior year in college, but the good news is that we get this for free in the frequency data!

Each element of the frequency data represents a frequency band from 20Hz to 20KHz (the range of sound audible to the human ear). For the less musically inclined, the sounds near the 20Hz range would be low, like a bass drum, a tuba, or the lower notes of a piano (the ones on the left side). The sound near the 20KHz range would be high, like a flute, violin, or the high notes of a piano (the ones on the right side). What complicates things a bit is that the distribution of these bands is logarithmic, which means that elements at the higher end of the spectrum represent more frequencies than those at the lower end.

Each value of these elements (from 0.0 to 1.0) represent the power level of that frequency band. Take a look at this video (coming soon), which is our basic visualizer playing another song. Notice how the lower frequencies (on the left side of the screen) bounce up and down in synch with the bass drum of the beat at the beginning of the song. Similarly, the upper frequencies (on the right side of the screen) bounce up and down in synch with the snare drum of the beat. Cool!

Even if you’ve never heard the Mario Bros. theme song in your entire life (in which case you must not be from around here), you can probably tap your foot to the song in the above video if you have the slightest semblence of rhythm. So if hearing and reacting to a beat is so simple to humans, we should be able to teach our games to hear and react to beats in music as well. This is one of the topics we’ll explore on future posts. Some other topics I hope to discuss include:

Porting our example to the Xbox 360 (only involves a few extra steps)
Filtering out some audio data to more closely align what we hear with what we see
On the same note, emphasizing some audio data for some purpose
Some more applications of visualization data as visualizers in games
Some experimental uses of visualization data to drive gameplay

Hopefully this post has been helpful in generating more thought around XNA’s new VisualizationData class. If you’ve been playing around with music visualization, add your experiences to this thread. Stay tuned for more!

Happy Holidays!

Ron

X3DAudio with XACT

BarryS — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:33:53 GMT

I am trying to Integrate X3DAudio with XACT to change a sound source location. I applied the changes as per the MSDN article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee416190(VS.85).aspx (of the same name) to the the Tut01_PlayCue_2008 solution found in the August 2009 DirectX SDK.

The sample plays a short sound at the press of a key. After following the article to the letter, there is no evidence that a change to the source location has an audible affect.

Does anyone have a suggestion make this work?

XACT 3 with Game Studio 3.1 shows "The .xap file is the wrong version."

leesiulung — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:12:02 GMT

However, running it with XACT 2 runs fine. The code is exact in both instances.

My code is as follows

    
                        AudioEngine audioEngine; 
        
                        WaveBank waveBank; 
        
                        SoundBank soundBank; 
        
                        Cue trackCue; 
        
                        audioEngine = new AudioEngine(@"Content\Audio\GameAudio.xgs"); 
        
                        waveBank = new WaveBank(audioEngine, @"Content\Audio\Wave Bank.xwb"); 
        
                        soundBank = new SoundBank(audioEngine, @"Content\Audio\Sound Bank.xsb"); 
        
                        trackCue = soundBank.GetCue("sound"); 
        
                        trackCue.Play();

Sound clean up

MarkMacumber — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:39:26 GMT

Hi all,

I have an application that Im writing where there will be heaps of little sounds being played when a user spins a dial (clicking sounds), at the moment im just getting the cues and playing them, and Im not really disposing of them at all...

What is best practice for keeping everything clean?

Call Dispose() on each Cue? How can you tell when a cue ends?

Thanks
Mark

Problem with category volume not working in game

jzzdan — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:37:50 GMT

I was wondering if anyone has seen this problem. I'm triggering sounds using XUI XActSound and I have my sounds assign to different categories. When adjusting volume for categories and previewing on 360 using the AudioConsole, I can hear the volume changes but when running the game, even setting up a category volume to -96dB doesn't do any thing. It seems like the category assignment is ignored for some reason or the volume settings don't work.
Any ideas why?

Thanks,
- Daniel

Problem looping sound in the right time.

Silvermax — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:25:19 GMT

I have 2 songs in my game. The loops are created in Soundforge in a specific point, so the music repeats without losing the rhythm. The problem is that works fine on the PC but in the xbox, the music goes to the end and start again from the beginning. Any idea of why it happens? The music is made with XACT3. The only diferent option between the pc and the xbox is the compression (as much as i know) xWMA for xbox and ADCPM for PC. If i chose PCM in xbox it loops ok, but the files are huge. Any idea? thnx.

Synth to PC

PepperBoxer — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 20:56:34 GMT

Hi,

I hope I'm posting this in the right section. Hopefully, it isn't too off-topic.

I have a Yamaha W-7 that features a 16-track sequencer. I can save my compositions to the built-in double-density floppy drive. However, I would like to be able to save the MIDI data, in addition to the real audio output, to my computer’s HD... and not rely on the floppy drive.

I purchased a MIDI to USB cable. I downloaded the free version of Anvil Studio and the keyboard and computer seem to be able to communicate with one another. However, I seem to be restricted to Anvil’s software for synth voices.

So, I guess I have two questions:

1) What software should I be using to save the MIDI data and allow for playback using the built-in W-7 voices?

2) I presume all MIDI data will be passed through the MIDI/USB cable. What’s the best way to record the audio output of the W-7 to my computer’s HD? (Analog output directly to my computer’s soundcard input?)

Sorry for the newb questions. I’m basically a guitar guy and this is my first foray into this MIDI stuff.

Oh, I guess I should also state that I’m using a PC with Window’s Vista. I’m also looking for cheap/free solutions!

If anybody could point me in the right direction, it would be most appreciated.

stopping sounds using cues

jzzdan — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 23:57:21 GMT

Hey guys,

I'm new to XACT so please keep that in mind (I've been using FMOD Designer for quite some time). What I'm trying to figure out is how to create cues that would fade out and stop sounds. I know I can attach the stop event to a track but how do I tell it which event to stop? It's very much possible that I'm trying to do it the wrong way so I welcome any suggestions.

Thanks,

- Daniel

How to ensure all sounds stop?

MarkMacumber — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:18:11 GMT

I have a WPF application (not a game) that is utilising the XACT software, and I have many different cues that get played on certain stop/start events.

When the Stop events occur, I stop the cue associated with the Start event that played the cue, via an IDictionary<UserObject, Cue> implementation.

You can think of it like this:

    
            public void Startevent(UserObject obj) 
        
            { 
        
            //...get cue... 
        
            _cues.Add(obj, cue); 
        
            } 
        
            public void StopEvent(UserObject obj) 
        
            { 
        
            _cues[obj].Stop(); 

            _cues[obj].Dispose();

            _cues[obj] = null;

            _cues.Remove(obj) 
        
            }

However, I cannot guarantee that the Stop event will get fired, (well I think thats the issue), and sometimes, there is a cue playing that should have stopped, but is still playing. I have debugged, and I know that it is not in the _cues collection either, but somehow its still playing (my cues repeat over and over).

Is there a section of the API that I have not seen that will allow me to get all playing cues, check if they should be playing, and stop them if they should not be?

Cheers,
Mark

Extracting filenames from the media library APIs

EpicSeptemViginti — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:39:58 GMT

I have a need to extract as much information about songs loaded on the system. (ID3 tags and more)

I discovered TagLib# for getting such ID3 information, however I need to acquire the filename of the songs in order to use the TagLib library.

So my question is:

Is there a way to extract the filename of songs from the Song class in the new Media namespace?

XACT and Panning

MarkMacumber — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 04:44:21 GMT

Hi Guys,

I did a quick search on the forums and did not really find anything helpful, so I will just go ahead and ask it. Can someone please explain the Panning (Apply3D) effects of a Cue?

I have seen the example code, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd940200.aspx but their code does not work for me... do I need do do something at design time (in XACT) to enable panning other than selecting the "360 Pan" checkbox?

If someone could explain this to me, or even just give me something to read that does actually explain it, not just a slab of code, that would be awesome!

Cheers,
Mark

XACT3: cues cause framerate drops on the 360

RandomTiger — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:30:18 GMT

My game is very simple and usually runs at 60 fps, however calling SoundBank.GetCue() (not cue.Play() ) for a moment causes my game to stall. This happens when I'm running the game on the 360 launched by from express, if I launch it directly from the 360 the frame rate doesnt drop but I get a lot of crackling on the audio.

Can anyone help?

public static void Play(string name)
        {
            if (BuildConstants.SOUND_ON && soundbank != null)
            {
                Cue cue = soundbank.GetCue(name);

                if (m_cueHashset.ContainsKey(name))
                {
                    m_cueHashset.Remove(name);
                }

                m_cueHashset.Add(name, cue);
                cue.Play();
            }
        }

XACT crashes when connecting to host

carltonMediaAudio — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:30:44 GMT

Hi,
I'm having a lot of trouble with XACT recently. I'm running XACT 3.0 on Win XP sp3. I have a realtec and sound blaster audio card in my machine. I use the sound blaster card/drivers exclusively.
I've used XACT on a daily basis for two years and had not run into this issue until now.

---------------
repro:

open project file. //xact starts up fine.
open audio console. //notice xact doesn't automatically connect to the audio console
select Audition>connect to 'username' (local)

XACT hangs while it tries to connect and then crashes.

---------------

I've tried switching audio drivers/cards and no change.

Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks!
Marc

Problem with compression

Silvermax — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:30:35 GMT

I'm working right know in the game music.

Seting the music compresion to XMA or xWMA (in xbox) result to an Exception in the line waveBank = new WaveBank(audioEngine, "\\content\\audio\\wave bank.xwb"); Using PCM compression works fine (but of course the wave bank is huge).

In PC the same. Using xWMA raises the exception. PCM and ADPCM works fine.

                            -       $exception  {System.InvalidOperationException: This resource could not be created.         
            en Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio.WaveBank..ctor(AudioEngine audioEngine, String nonStreamingWaveBankFilename)         
            en Another_Puzzle_LIVE.Pantallas.PantallaSilvermax.PantallaActiva()         
            en Another_Puzzle_LIVE.Pantalla.Update()         
            en Another_Puzzle_LIVE.Pantallas.PantallaSilvermax.Update()         
            en Another_Puzzle_LIVE.GestorPantallas.Update()         
            en Another_Puzzle_LIVE.Game1.Update(GameTime gameTime)         
            en Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Tick()         
            en Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.HostIdle(Object sender, EventArgs e)         
            en Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GameHost.OnIdle()         
            en Microsoft.Xna.Framework.XboxGameHost.Run()         
            en Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Run()         
            en Another_Puzzle_LIVE.Program.Main(String[] args)         
            }   System.Exception {System.InvalidOperationException}         
                     

Any suggestion?

Loud Buzz Sound when I play a sound from XACT.

Sean Stringer — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:17:03 GMT

This doesn't happen all the time, only on a specific sound. Instead of playing the sound, I get a loud buzz. I was wondering if anyone knew the reason it would do that.

Why is accessing Ablum info very slow from PC

ShadowRage — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:24:12 GMT

Hi all,

I've got a music driven game and I want to stream music from the PC. Playing tracks from the PC is fine, but reading Album names from the MediaLibrary is amazingly slow! It can take up to 5 seconds just to get the name of 1 album, artist or song.

The guide doesn't seem to have this problem though.

Am I missing something here? Is there another way to get music info from a PC?

Or is this just the way it is?

Cheers,
Steve

In Playtest: Beat Hazard

Detecting Song delay

FlukeDude — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:58:51 GMT

How would I do this? Basically I have a funciton spawnStuff();, and I want to call that function when the song actually starts playing. I'm using MediaPlayer.Play(soundtrack);. Any ideas?

.wav file not found?

Mega Games — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 07:21:38 GMT

When I compile, I basically get an error code stating:"chord.wav file not found". When I include the chord.wav file in the Project it works. But I'm using XACT, so I shouldn't need it in there, right? At least that's what my book says.

Here's the code(note: I removed all non audio related code to keep the size down):

    
            using System; 
        
            using System.Collections.Generic; 
        
            using System.Linq; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Net; 
        
            using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Storage; 
        
            namespace XNABook1WindowsGame1 
        
            { 
        
                public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game 
        
                { 
        
                    // Audio objects 
        
                    AudioEngine audioEngine; 
        
                    WaveBank waveBank; 
        
                    SoundBank soundBank; 
        
                    Cue myLoopingSound; 
        
                    public Game1() 
        
                    { 
        
                        Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; 
        
                    } 
        
                    protected override void Initialize() 
        
                    { 
        
                        audioEngine = new AudioEngine(@"Content\MySounds.xgs"); 
        
                        // Assume the default names for the wave and sound banks 
        
                        // To change these names, change properties in XACT. 
        
                        waveBank = new WaveBank(audioEngine, @"Content\Wave Bank.xwb"); 
        
                        soundBank = new SoundBank(audioEngine, @"Content\Sound Bank.xsb"); 
        
                        myLoopingSound = soundBank.GetCue("notify"); 
        
                        myLoopingSound.Play(); 
        
                        base.Initialize(); 
        
                    } 
        
                    protected override void LoadContent() 
        
                    { 
        
                    } 
        
                    protected override void UnloadContent() 
        
                    { 
        
                    } 
        
                    protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) 
        
                    { 
        
                        if (mySprite1.CirceCollides(mySprite2)) 
        
                        { 
        
                            soundBank.PlayCue("chord"); 
        
                        } 
        
                        base.Update(gameTime); 
        
                    } 
        
                    protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) 
        
                    { 
        
                    } 
        
                } 
        
            }

ZuneHD cannot load .mp3s? Of course it can.

FallenArms3 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 21:13:34 GMT

Alright, so I'm working on a Ukulele App for the Zune HD. It's in very early stages, the code is messy, I'm an extreme beginner (first app), etc, etc.

Anyways, I'm getting an error when I try to tell the ZuneHD to load all my .mp3 files. I have no idea why it wouldn't be able to load these files.

Here is a PasteBin of my entire project code: PasteBin

The error I get is this:

"An unhandled exception of type 'Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content.ContentLoadException' occurred in Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll

Additional information: Error loading "\Audio\Mp3\1A or 4A.mp3". Cannot open file."

All of the code is all in the PasteBin for your review. I can assure you that the files are there and are .mp3. If anyone can help me, I would be extremely grateful.