Change playlist from OGG to MP3 default please

[Poochi]

Hey everybody its Poochi here and i've been around since the beginning of LFS and I've been astounded at the progress made and this game just gets better and better and im saving up to get my simulator set going on so ill keep you up to date. ANYWAYS what I was noticing is the inconvienance of OGG and converted songs over to your own custom playlist for the new versions of LFS mostly upon version T and now just updated U. MP3 would be the best option because OGG is outdated and the lag I get from uploading the list in gameplay seems to kill my FPS. I have a decent computer nothing fancy but I average out to 40 fps or 50. But with the playlist loading I lag a bit since I have so many and the game doesnt seem to handle it so well. I was purposing that switching to MP3 would help and maybe most of the songs placed in LFS converted to OGG will be playable because sometimes they are rejected due to either file size or other erros. BUT most work for the good part if I am informed in any of this please feel free to educate me..im still learning :)

[XCNuse]

OGG is outdated?

do you even know how old MP3 is lol? MP3 (i read this the other day) was invented over 16 years ago

as for OGG, if you have the settings right, you can definetly lower the filesize by a ton, equal or even lower to that of MP3

[NotAnIllusion]

Isn't MP3 licensed for a royalty fee, whereas OGG is free?

[l2acer1]

:google: mp3 to ogg converter :nana: if i can do it u can do it! haha trust me :chairfall

[sil3ntwar]

Thomson Consumer Electronics controls licensing of the MPEG-1/2 Layer 3 patents in countries that recognize software patents, including the United States and Japan, but not EU countries. Thomson has been actively enforcing these patents. Thomson has been granted software patents in EU countries and by the European Patent Office [1], but it is unclear whether or not they would be enforced by courts there.

Ogg is a patent-free, fully open multimedia bitstream container format designed for efficient streaming and file compression (storage).

[Hatemaker]

I say just stick to .OGG, as it plays with just about any multimedia player that's available for your computer. Then if you want to add musik, all you have to do is just get an MP3-OGG converter, or "re-aquire" the musik you want in .OGG, instead of .MP3.

[G.D.Matteoni]

I'm a sound engineer, trust me, OGG compression is much better and licence free. Nothing to add. Just the best choose for a masterpiece like LFS.:D

[Jakg]

Hey everybody its Poochi here and i've been around since the beginning of LFS and I've been astounded at the progress made and this game just gets better and better and im saving up to get my simulator set going on so ill keep you up to date. ANYWAYS what I was noticing is the inconvienance of OGG and converted songs over to your own custom playlist for the new versions of LFS mostly upon version T and now just updated U. MP3 would be the best option because OGG is outdated and the lag I get from uploading the list in gameplay seems to kill my FPS. I have a decent computer nothing fancy but I average out to 40 fps or 50. But with the playlist loading I lag a bit since I have so many and the game doesnt seem to handle it so well. I was purposing that switching to MP3 would help and maybe most of the songs placed in LFS converted to OGG will be playable because sometimes they are rejected due to either file size or other erros. BUT most work for the good part if I am informed in any of this please feel free to educate me..im still learning :)so your compoaining because LFS slows down when your converting your music? well that will happen no matter what, and no way is ogg outdated, secondly, i hate mp3!

[tristancliffe]

Real racing drivers don't listen to music. Hell, even I don't listen to musc when I'm driving quickly in real life. The engine, gearbox, tyres and wind noise provide the greatest quality sound track known to man (but I'd prefer a V6 or a V12 over a straight 4).

[MadCatX]

Yup, thats it.... music is disturbing you... and thats not the best thing you want if youre braking into the T1 on As Nat....:nod:

[Jakg]

secondly, i only have music during menus, and only listen to music while driving if im racing th oval (3 corners can be a bit boring!)

[Seahorse]

Simpler question - I don't race with the music on at all - but that does stop the little VU metter on the bottom left appears or for that matter, looking like the music is still going. How do I totally remove them? Can't see an option for it anywhere...:(

[tristancliffe]

The little wibbly bit in the bottom left is nothing to do with music - LOL!!!! ROFL in fact! It's the ping meter - each player has two bars, an instantaneous value and a time averaged value, and the order is the same as on the connections list.

[Aegilops]

I wonder if it's possible for LFS to utilise the on-board sound decoding engines / codecs? E.g. I guess something like a DirectShow filter for video, but for sound. (DirectPlay? I forget the Marketing Name(tm) (R) (C) )

For instance, I have a whole ton of albums that I've transcoded to AAC via iTunes, plus the odd MP3 kicking around too. It is possible (Foobar) to convert them to OGG but it does double up your disk space usage. You should be able to just nominate a series of folders to LFS and it should crawl those directories recursively, adding any playable media files to its channels.

Yeah, yeah, yeah ... get yerself a bigger hard drive. Sorry dude - I have one of those 10K Raptors (73GB).

Other observations when racing with music:

The Ogg decoding engine insists on showing all the associated tags when a new track starts, which means that at the start of a race, it insists on flooding the top left corner of the screen with a whole ton of useless metadata (e.g. track name, album, year, genre, artist's favourite colour....) that neatly covers the start lights.

Also some tracks are MUCH louder than others, which most certainly isn't LFS's fault, but it can create quite an interesting effect when you tweak the audio volume level for the quiet albums, and then Black Shuck comes blasting through my headphones. Mind you, tends to help my laptimes when it does :thumb:

Also they should do a fancy cross-fade like it does in iTunes. That would be very professional.

And the user interface for selecting music is just soooo cryptic :shy:. I thought it simply didn't work for ages, until I actually *clicked* to select the single channel I had defined. And what's all this about having to click 'new' to add a track, then click 'name' to select the media file? It should be possible to have an 'add all tracks in this folder' to get you started.

So next time you're whizzing past Rakhsh and you see my head bobbing from side to side, you'll know why my racing is so poor. :nod: ("In a town ... in the East ... woooah ... (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=6433580&s=143460&i=6433502)" )
Rakhsh

[Jakg]

if it too loud, re-incode it with volume leveling!

[Seahorse]

The little wibbly bit in the bottom left is nothing to do with music - LOL!!!! ROFL in fact! It's the ping meter - each player has two bars, an instantaneous value and a time averaged value, and the order is the same as on the connections list.

Explains why it going all the time I suppose - still can't turn the damn thing off - I find it a distraction...

[tailing]

I don't listen to music whilst racing but personally if I was I would just load up foobar which is a very low resource music player and then I could listen to any format I wanted.
It all seems too simple, I must be missing something :D

[Jakg]

I don't listen to music whilst racing but personally if I was I would just load up foobar which is a very low resource music player and then I could listen to any format I wanted.
It all seems too simple, I must be missing something :Dsame with XMPlay, i always run lfs in windowed mode, and XMPlay fits perfectly in the top left in mini mode, i just assign a few keys (the media keys on my keybooard only work in WMP) to play, pause etc, its probably the best way to do it!

[joen]

It's all a matter of money. If the devs would choose to use MP3 they have to pay licenses/royalties/whatever it's called. Since OGG is open-source (and certainly not outdated compared to MP3!), they can use it freely.
I really don't see the problem. If you want to listen to music while racing, get a lightweight mediaplayer like Foobar or MPlayer and let it play in the background. They take up very limited resources.

Even more lightweight i think: http://www.evilplayer.server-host.com/. Never used it but I found this recently and seems very lightweight.

[uss77]

.ogg can is smaller than .mp3 @least when you use Audiocommander coz I got 0.78Mb off by conv. .mp3 to .ogg
:thumb: :nod: :thumb:

[xaotik]

You can use foobar (http://www.foobar2000.org/) - set global hotkeys for "previous", "next" and "pause/play" and use that to play any music you want instead of the in-game music player. Foobar has a very small memory footprint and is very easy on your CPU too so I doubt it'll affect performance - it's also a very nice and non-obtrusive audio player.

[joen]

.ogg can is smaller than .mp3 @least when you use Audiocommander coz I got 0.78Mb off by conv. .mp3 to .ogg
:thumb: :nod: :thumb:

That's not really a good example because what you're doing is re-compressing an already compressed file. If you re-compress an mp3 file to a new mp3-file it will be smaller as well.
A good comparison would be to convert a song from an audio CD to mp3, and convert the same song from the CD to ogg, using the same bitrate and other settings, and then compare the filesizes.
All you're doing now is decreasing the audio quality by re-compressing the song for very little gain in size reduction.

[Jakg]

.ogg can is smaller than .mp3 @least when you use Audiocommander coz I got 0.78Mb off by conv. .mp3 to .ogg
:thumb: :nod: :thumb:and yet at the same bit rate it has a higher quality!

[TagForce]

FLAC playback would be nice... Free Lossless Audio Codec... It's bigger than MP3, or OGG, but it's bit-equal to the original source.

[XsX!]

I'm a sound engineer, trust me, OGG compression is much better and licence free. Nothing to add. Just the best choose for a masterpiece like LFS.:D

could you please change your sign?
you should be banned for that.

[CHR20000]

no probs with ogg...no music while racing...
:thumb::nod:or winamp running :D d´n´b @ low volumelevel

[kame9]

I need to conver more than 40 songs mp3 to ogg only for lfs :scratchch:scratchch?

:banghead::shrug:

I prefer mp3 :thumb:

[TagForce]

I need to conver more than 40 songs mp3 to ogg only for lfs :scratchch:scratchch?

:banghead::shrug:

I prefer mp3 :thumb:

Orrrrr, you disable the ingame music completely and have a low footprint mp3 player running in the background.
Although I did convert 3 CDs to OGG from MP3 and it took me all of 10 minutes.

[the_angry_angel]

Whats wrong with running another media player in the background?! Foobar, for example, is a low memory footprint player, and perfect.

[Thorvertonian]

Or disable in-game music and listen to your enine and tyres!

honestly, it should be opened up to standard playlists, mp3, ogg, wma....

but it's ogg, which is high quality and probably the best for the job, so keep it as is for now, if you want anything else, run a seperate player in bg and disable the in-game music....