Longer Notes Lengths for Programmable Speakers

[Tim2162286]

After playing around with the programmable speakers trying to program Landslide, I found it really difficult to handle the fact that the length of the programmable speaker sounds are too short to be used for half and whole notes, especially at a slower tempo. Therefor, I would like to suggest making some of the sounds longer, or implement some other method to extend the length of a single tone, without restarting to sound like it does currently.

[Roxor128]

Yeah, I have to admit I was a little surprised when I went poking around the game's data files and found the sounds for the programmable speaker were a half-second OGG file for each note. I was expecting something more akin to a MOD file.

Quick primer on MOD files: They're a family of music file formats which contain a set of note data and a bunch of digital samples to use as instruments. When played back, the player program uses the note data to adjust the playback speed, volume, and panning of the samples, mixing the resulting output in real-time. Slower playback speeds give lower notes and faster speeds give higher notes, and the instrument definitions typically provide a means to allow the composer to specify a range of the sample data to loop.

One of the most popular MOD formats back in the mid-to-late 1990s (shows my age) was Fast Tracker II's .XM format. The program also has a .XI format for storing individual instruments, though I can't seem to find documentation on the structure of the latter. You could probably achieve a similar effect by just having a sound file and a text file containing information about how to handle it (sample rate to use at middle C, loop type, loop start and end, volume and panning envelopes if you're feeling sophisticated (or trying to mimic FT2's capabilities), etc).

[ssilk]

This is definitely something, that should be modded.

[ichVII]

I want to play Anakins Betrayal on speaker while shooting everyone with artillery. Hope none of them read this.

But without this, the many long notes sound really bad. It take all the fun out of it.

In other words: +1