CD music doesn't play

[ccarroll321]

Hello,

I've been having problems getting CD audio to work with some games. Monkey Island works fine. I extracted all the audio as mp3 and named them track1.mp3--track2.mp3 etc. For some reason with Sam & Max and Fate of Atlantis this method does not work. Could someone help me out?

Thank you
C

[eriktorbjorn]

I've been having problems getting CD audio to work with some games. Monkey Island works fine. I extracted all the audio as mp3 and named them track1.mp3--track2.mp3 etc. For some reason with Sam & Max and Fate of Atlantis this method does not work. Could someone help me out?

The audio tracks in Sam & Max aren't used by the game. Apparently, they're just included as a bonus. I haven't heard of any version of Fate of Atlantis that uses audio tracks for music. The DOS version, at least, uses iMUSE for music, which is too advanced to be emulated with audio tracks.

[clem]

yeah, these games don't use CD audio.
edit: ouch, beat me to answering

[ccarroll321]

oops been a while, thanks for the help fellas. pretty shocking though, doesn't use cd audio dash it

[Ceri Cat]

Understandable when you consider IMUSE was developed so they had a great amount of control over the playing of the music, so they could do things like dynamic crossfades, intermixing of tracks on the fly, and other things. It's simply impossible to replicate the tricks IMUSE could perform internally with CD audio.

[Longcat]

nothings impossible, just very very hard;)

[Ceri Cat]

Ah no with the nature of redbook audio it's impossible. iMUSE can switch on and off different instruments at will, something you can't do with most forms of digital or analog audio unless you have a multi channel media format with each instrument recorded to a different channel. The crossfades and mixing I agree can be performed, however the annoyance of buffering/caching an entire CD audio track isn't worth it, you'd be better off using more efficient means such as flac, ogg or mp3 than CD audio, and when most of those games came out requiring a cache file of over 100 megs for a game was an unheard of and ridiculous requirement. Plus the starting and stopping at points in the song IMUSE allows (and is used in the MI games a lot) also is quite difficult to achieve fluidly with a CD audio track.

My boss at Cadogan essentially wanted me to reinvent iMUSE using mp3s or something similar for our original project. Glad he didn't know it had been done before. Ugh I really need to find my code for the audio layer, it's the one thing I had to produce that was actually somewhat innovative.

[Arantor]

Isn't that how the Loom CD version works - it's essentially one big audio track which the game jumps back and forth with?

I remember when I finally got hold of Loom CD - specifically for use with ScummVM - that I ended up ripping the audio track because there was a lag of a second or so between the animation/sound request and the sound being played due to my CD drive.

[md5]

No, iMuse is not used as far as I know in Loom. Lucasarts did make a later version of iMuse (iMuse digital - which used parts of digitized music) in Monkey Island 3, but that used its own set of tricks too

[Ceri Cat]

By the time of MI3 you're also dealing with INSANE for the animation. Like everything it undergoes evolution, and Lucasarts had to work with the fact that midi music really doesn't sound good on most soundcards so they had to improve iMUSE so it could work with digitized samples, I'd love to look at how they handled the issues they faced. It's one of the only bits of technology made by a game company that is patented though, and I can't blame them for patenting iMUSE, even now there are few people who've developed anything that handles music anywhere near the way it does. By comparison my work is was quite clunky though it worked well enough given the genre we developed for.

And yeah md5 pretty sure you're right about Loom, iMUSE was developed due to frustrations with the audio system used in versions 1-4 of SCUMM, first game to feature iMUSE was MI2 in 91.

[moonisharsh]

I think it can not play,but you may suggest them to design a new one with this function.

[md5]

As mentioned already, the music tracks in Monkey Island 1 and Loom were part of the game itself. The music tracks in the Sam'n'Max CD were not part of the game, and were only added as a bonus. I believe that Fate of Atlantis did not have any extra soundtracks

[Ceri Cat]

Not that I'm aware of either. There's no CD audio on my FoA disc that I'm aware of. I'd need to dig it out again to check though.

[chojin]

I didn't even know Sam & Max had Audio Tracks, since there is no hint on the CD case. Thanks :)

My FoA CD (part of Indy Adventure Pack) doesn't contain audio, my player instead played some data tracks - now i'm deaf. I had a small hope the game would contain a German Talkie when I bought it, but obvisouly the CD is just 90% empty.

[Ceri Cat]

The audio tracks on S&M are a "secret" bonus, and were never accessible ingame. And next time try your computer's CD player, it'll normally skip the data track and head for the redbook audio. Less harsh on your ears. I used to actually record the music from my favourite games onto casette so I know the agony you went through with the data, it sounds like a chorus of modems.