More sound playback formats - Solution

Sorry guys, I was very busy last week, and still I'm still currently very busy. I was surprised to see a locked thread (the first one in our humble little forum I think).

Anyway, the issue is playing music and sound files that cannot be played by the built in media player. This includes MP3, OGG, S3M, IT, XM, etc. Not sure how common each of those are, but I do remember seeing them in various WADs. To actually implement players for these formats is definitely outside of the scope of XWE. It would be very complex and time consuming, and it would be re-inventing the wheel. However, I would like to add support for these through "external editors". This particular issue (i.e. external editors) came up lots of times already, and it is definitely on the to-do list: what XWE needs is for the user to be able to assign an executable to different lump types. I think XMPlay plays all of the above, or I'm sure you guys have your own preferred players for these. XWE would extract the given lump to a temporary location and launch the given program. This will also allow the user to edit images in PhotoShop or some other graphics editor.

I'll work on it when I have time. I really think this is the proper solution for the issue. Thanks for bringing it up, now I know it's a priority.

Thanks Csabo and...Steeveeo = pwned, told ya it was not trivial :-p

Finally! A solution was found!

Maes said:

Thanks Csabo and...Steeveeo = pwned, told ya it was not trivial :-p

Strange that SLumpEd has no problems doing it then. What's so bad about third party sound libraries like FMOD?

Seeing how XWE is written in Delphi, since I've used it too for certain image and file-processing tools, I know that using an external DLL takes considerably more skill and time than using a drag&drop Delphi component, without wanting to doubt Csabo's programming skills.

However, I guess that's one of the reasons that fmod.dll can't be juat "slapped there" and work just like that. I don't know what SlumpEd is written in, but in any case, using a DLL isn't the same as using a ready component, in Delphi.

SLumpED is written in C++.

Anyway, FMOD has a Delphi API interface shipped with the SDK so this doesn't even matter.

Considering xwe is a windows only application, portability isn't an issue anyway.

Anyway, I have offered my skills in the past to Csabo if he needed help working on xwe, since I have written many doom tools in delphi.

Good point, I guess FMod would be an option. But as far as I know it still won't support everything though, such as IMF files (weird midi like music entries from old Apogee games). I did get requests for playing those as well. Winamp does play those through a plugin. So the consensus is that you guys would rather have "built in" support for OGG etc, rather than the generic solution?

I looked at FMod very briefly, but could not get the Delphi examples to work (died with "the procedure entry point FMUSIC_GetRow could not be located in the dynamic link library fmod.dll"). If I could manage getting this to work and it integrated nicely (e.g. the dll still wouldn't be required), I wouldn't be against it.