Home Page Forums Other Emulator Message Boards Audio Overload Not quite AO, but...

I stand corrected. What about USF, though? Like I said, I was under the impression it uses the correct driver for each game, ripped from the ROM itself.

Yes, USFs by definition use the correct driver. There would be no Rare rips otherwise.

But they are, really. Even Corlett reused drivers from time to time (Final Fantasy 2 from Origins uses FFIX driver IIRC).
You must've missed that great flood of Japanese contributions, all using davironica/Mark Grass generic drivers or Tactics Ogre/Suikoden 2/Wild Arms 2 drivers. Current PSF/2 rip count stands at 500, I'd say less then 150 (you know, the game more then two people not from Japan care about) use original drivers.


Even some kingshriek rips use incorrect driver (as stated in the comment field). Marica: Shinjitsu no Sekai, Soukyugurentai, Virus. Many Japanese rips use different drivers as well. Not as much as with PSF, but that's largly due to outstanding ripping tools kingshriek provided.

great sounding player, how to export 2sf files to an audio format, or teach Amarok to use them?

vio2sf as a Xine plugin? Interesting idea. Why not convert all AO playing engines to GStreamer or Xine plugins? Linux nerds will love it

About the generic driver discussion: A few years ago when CaitSith2 was still actively involved in PSF stuff (at least, I don't see him anywhere, anymore), he had included that info in his PSF archives. Anyway, who cares if it's the original driver or not, as long as it sounds right. If there's a real audiophile out there, he/she will re-rip the game. Anyone else won't hear the difference. Some other games will probably even require such a generic driver (Tri-Ace PS2 games), because even PCSX2 hasn't managed to run their executables, yet. However, I still doubt that Star Ocean 3 et al even use sequenced music.

EDIT: Mods, delete this last paragraph, if you like.

I've been thinking of that because:

a) I'd certainly love to include *SF in my Amarok playlists

b) Songbird is planning on switching to GStreamer as the backend on all platforms, which gives a multi-player multi-platform story (especially since Amarok is also coming to Windows/Mac and will almost certainly use GStreamer there too)

As far as the rest, audiophile or not I like to know that rips are playing identically to how their actual game does, which is the point. That's why I appreciated it back when CaitSith2 used to re-rip PSFs using the correct driver.

a) i've always wondered how you guys listen to vgm & chiptunes on Linux - on windos, you get plugins for Foobar2000, tune each to make its format sound the way you like it and mix chiptunes with audio in the playlist - on Linux it's not so straightforward: some players like Xmms & Audacious can play chiptunes but have incredibly intolerable interface or playlist, others like Amarok look nice but play almost no chiptunes, those few that work sound really bad and don't have any options to tune them. Using various CLI tools, M1 and AO to make WAVs seems like the only option, but WAVs are final and lack tuning options.

b) if making 2sf & plugins from AO is possible then is it not staightforward to make plugins for both backends at the same time? Amarok used to have GStreamer but some problems occured and now it's focused on Xine

I listen to VGM and chiptunes in AO on Linux, that's sort of the point :-)

I see what you mean about Amarok not using Gstreamer now, that sucks actually. Especially since Gstreamer is the official decoder for KDE4 :-)

i'm sorry but i have great trouble using AO for actual music listening other than cheking out stuff or making WAVs, from the screenshots, it looks like at least Mac version has different interface so maybe it's my KDE that disables certain functionality in AO which leaves me switching tracks manually and pressing Play every time the music stops?

if GStreamer is the official backend of Phonon then Amarok 2 will have no chance and you shouldn't waste time with Xine unless it's easy to do it in parallel

Believe it or not, you're the first person in the history of the project to even hint at what they want the Linux GUI to do. This is why usability is a bit off. Please list the minimal set of changes that would make it usable for you.

ETA: Apparently we've scared you off. I won't get mad, really I always use AO via the debug-only commandline interface (which isn't publically available) so I really have no idea how good the GUI is beyond giving it cool stuff like drag-and-drop.