System background music question

[Nokia3310]

I've spent weeks getting systems and games set up (I came into Hyperspin as a PC emu noob) and I'm finally at a stage where I'm ready to customise the hell out of things. This is what drew me to HS in the first place. The main thing that I want to do is add background music on a per system basis, playing continuously as you browse through the wheel. However, I only know how to do this on a per game basis at the moment and Google hasn't been my friend on this one. Does anyone have a solution?

My intention is to create at least one mini mix (a 3-4 minute DJ set) of videogame theme tune remixes for each system. They'll probably end up being longer because I'll be cramming a lot in to each track, but shorter is better...after all, you would have to be suffering from some kind of serious indecisiveness condition if it took any longer than 3-4 minutes to choose a game.

If anyone knows how to get it to randomly select a different track each time you enter a system wheel then this would be even better (i.e. making the SNES wheel play one of several tracks selected for SNES). It would mean that I could use individual remixes or have several mini mixes per system. I'm itching to begin this project, but I need to be sure that I can make it work before I put the hours in. Seems pretty pointless otherwise.

[djvj]

This shouldn't be that hard, using the same method as HyperSpeech uses by enabling ledblinky support and diverting it to something that plays music. But you need to break out some scripting skills to make it happen.

[Hyperion]

I don't have the slightest idea how to do this but I'm interested to hear others' solutions. Looks like some of the cooler ideas to enhance Hyperspin require coding skills. Mind you, I'm not saying the stock Hyperspin isn't cool enough as is.

Although the background music might clash with the game movie music. You might have to make the either the BG music or the movie sound much quieter or turn off the movie sound all together.

[djvj]

You do bring up a good point Hyperion. Too much audio ends up sounding too busy and the user doesn't know where to listen. It's a real fine line to getting it to sound right.

[THK]

I like the idea. I suppose one just has to turn off the vid sound and maybe even wheel sounds, or to a minimum volume, but this is easy enough.

[djvj]

This could possibly be something BBB can have in his API for 2.0. Ability to know when a video is being played and ended. I could add into my idle volume tool the ability to lower volume only while a video is playing. Without an API in HS1, it's more just a bunch of hacks to tell when that is happening.

[Nokia3310]

Video sounds can be turned off with the volume controls in HyperHQ (in the 'Sound' tab in main settings), so you coudl definitely make this work in HS1 without having video music or wheel sounds making everything sound awful.

The problem for me to do this is my very limited repertoire of programming skills (which basically consist of copying and pasting bits of other people's code that I occasionally understand and making a few changes). I looked at the Hyperspeech thread and a video on YouTube of it working though and I think I get what's entailed. It would mean making LED blinky use something like an old Winamp (something that uses little CPU power) rather than the speech program, right?

Since I don't use wheel sounds (other than then 'click') or game BGM, would it be possible to drop a bit of code into the themes so that audio played from the wheel sounds or background music folder doesn't change tracks when you move the wheel to a different game/system?

On a slightly unrelated question, can themes have a fullscreen video with or without music playing? It's an option I was going to explore anyway, but if it can be done with audio then this is a way of having background music. It would probably mean not using game videos (or completing the hellishly laborious task of editing them all to mute the sound) but I think you could have enough going on with a full screen video anyway...depending on what you have on the video. Just thinking of other, easier possibilities that involve little or no compromise.

[djvj]

Yea you pretty much got it right, but it would have to be scripted to change on only system changes and to ignore game changes. Then you would have continuous music playing while scrolling through games on a wheel. You can use my MFME ambience player I made in /Upload Here/djvj/MFME/ to play mp3s. Look in the MFME module to see how I use it.

[Fromlostdays]

There is a .... um nearly useless but not quite (and easier) workaround. If you edit a main menu theme (I did it for my DS wheel) in hypertheme by adding a system picture or something to take the place of a video, you can take the video out of the theme altogether. Then its a simple matter of converting whatever song you want to an FLV format, name it the same name as the system and put it in the mainmenu/videos folder. No video plays, but you get the sound. Plus side, its simple, and it works. I have professor layton's theme playing on my main menu ds entry, and a still-shot of the DS menu replacing what would otherwise be a video in the theme.

[chartwel]

I would like the ability to play different tracks from arcade game soundtracks for each theme. I have a lot of game soundtracks and to be able to play a random track from the game that you are currently one would be awesome

[halo33]

has this question been answered? I know its been a while, I just couldn't find an answer. Basically, I want to do as the OP stated. Have one mp3 playing as background music for each individual system menu. Sometimes I take a while scrolling through the games and I would like to have one song playing throughout. I do not want to take away the video previews though. (although maybe mute the audio)