Audio/XACT

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor - PROCEDURAL AUDIO!

simonjohnroberts — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:26:53 GMT

sobs openly.

Some toys for us lamers would be nice.

a camera API? sound buffer access... please.

thoughts anyone?

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor - PROCEDURAL AUDIO!

Catalin Zima — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:16:14 GMT

It seems that the requests for procedural sound is not high enough yet to make this a higher priority for the XNA team (who probably have lots of other things on their internal "TODO" list :) )

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor - PROCEDURAL AUDIO!

simonjohnroberts — Fri, 08 May 2009 11:00:12 GMT

Whatever happened to this?

Is audio still really the poor cousin of graphics...

procedural sound is essential to me.

xna could be so much more with it. There are many innovations around sound that I would dearly love to bring to the xbox.

Any ideas anyone?

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

The ZMan — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 10:40:46 GMT

No it did not...

This guy found a way around it http://forums.xna.com/thread/27913.aspx

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Apeoholic — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:33:22 GMT

Hi
Any news on this? did it make it into the 2.0 release?
I would like to generate sound on the fly (not actually having loos wav files)

Cheers
/Jimmy

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Labidus — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 11:44:19 GMT

I think we should have the control over sound/wave bank, at least adding wave manually or custum streaming for example
i am using XNA not for a game but for editor, lets say I made a tools for our game to setup a sound script and test it with XNA in the editor, right now I cannot use XNA for sound because I have no way to play an OGG file using streaming.

I don't want waste my time to convert stuffs in wavebank because the sound are loaded on the fly and the XNA format is useless for us since the game are not made in XNA btw. I just use XNA because they are no longuer support for DirectX in C#.

I prefer DirectSound but they generate exception on debug (C#) so I would prefer to use XNA but I cannot right now.

Please add more support for coder, XNA are not just for noob!

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Antony Kancidrowski — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:40:20 GMT

For me Loose Audio Files would be a nicety (I'm sure I could use them somewhere) but not pressing. My 0.02

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Kzoink — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 03:57:45 GMT

I think it's WAY more important to make it possible to play sounds by index as with the native XACT, thereby making it unnecessary for us to keep a bunch of strings in memory.

I currently have a large string table because of this that I would like to eliminate.

There are even more missing features that the native XACT has that should be implemented like notifications which are quite handy when preparing streaming wavebanks. Why not utilize .Net events for this? Seems like a good candidate. As it sits, we have no choice but to implement a thread or series of non-blocking calls ourselves to constantly check the IsPrepared flag. In addition, I noticed there's no functionality for preparing the soundbank for zero-latency streaming...

Also, marker support as in the native libraries is needed. I really hope that these features are not overlooked because the ones being talked about above are going to be used in a very small minority of cases and these features I have mentioned are already supported and just need to be exposed.

I noticed the newer updates to XACT also have support for 3d panning and a better interface. It sure would be nice if the XNA GSE version wasn't so time lagged that we have to be stuck with an old version.

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

DCProven — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 17:21:11 GMT

As not always the same person writes the code and the audio, it may be helpful to separate the code (music engine) from the audio files, so say the musician, can play around with different loops without having to recompile or install the whole environment just running the program and selecting the waves to play...

My 2 cents.

David.

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Omega — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 14:04:22 GMT

I cannot forsee ever needing that in the near future. I do like the idea of programmatically streaming audio however, so if you use the time that would have been spent adding the Loose Audio feature for implementing Programmatic Streaming, that would be a good use of time IMO.

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

XMunkki — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:58:57 GMT

Shawn Hargreaves:
YumYumMoose:

Playing loose WAV files - not very.
Playing streaming audio - great to have!

This is a very important distinction. Playing loose wav files (which would probably still need to be built in some way, and then loaded from disk in their entirety, just bypassing the XACT tool) is one new feature. Playing dynamic streaming audio is another. We could implement either one of these without the other, so it is important to be clear about which of the two scenarios you are most interested in.

But if the audio API allowed custom code generated audio streams (or even sounds, if not pure streaming), then you could easily load the wav files from the disk and stream them in. So all in all, custom streams is the "core" feature I'd like to see added. On top of that, users themselves can build wav/mp3/generated/whatever support, based on need. So a way to bypass the XACT tool and stream raw data in would be ideal. I'm not sure how far this direction the xbox 360 itself goes, though.

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Chromatic — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:33:24 GMT

There are times when our clients just want to play a sound ("ding.wav") in monotone. The current workflow for playing a sound is to start XACT, load a wave file, generate a suitable XML document, and then load the document at runtime. At the end of the day many of our users just want do this:

SoundBank sound = new SoundBank("wave.ding");
sound.Play();

I think its great that it supports 5.1 channel sound, listeners and emitters, but sometimes less is more.

Shaun
Suva Interactive (www.suva3d.com)

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Apeoholic — Tue, 08 May 2007 05:24:38 GMT

Hi
I would really like the "Dynamically generating sounds directly into the sound buffers" feature.

/Jimmy

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Mitch Walker — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 14:31:18 GMT

For those that want to provide the data to the audio buffers, what level of depth are you looking for? Getting the audio data from some source other than a file (programmatic, a large archive, etc) or are you wanting to do your own mixing, etc.?

Re: Loose Audio Files vs XACT Editor

Joel Martinez — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 13:08:02 GMT

Not:
Those are 3 different features. The one I am specifically asking about is the 3rd feature you list.

That was my point ... I think the feedback so far has been that some of the other features that you weren't asking about are more important.

Edit: and for what it's worth, I love XACT :-D I wouldn't bother bypassing it to load wavs dynamically ... though reading from the sound buffers might be interesting some day to do some visualizations or other features. I know I've got a few gameplay ideas around that.