Dose anyone here use ? I am looking for some good music and fx files to use with it (for use in both gaming and writing) hopfully to cover a wide variety of genres and settings. I am not too sure when I originally downloaded it, I just happened to stumble on the exe file this morning while I was going through my external hd (trying to organize it) but think it must have been at least two years ago. I looked all through my hd but didn't find any music for it so I can only guess I didn't d/l any when I got the program. I am going to buy the album on the webpage for horror games but wanted to know if anyone else had some suggestions or advice.

Richard

Ok, so I found some mood music to use with the program (edgen animations thanks to Denny in an unittentional, roundabout way) and still need some sound effects to go with it. Also I have discoved I don't care so much for the program, you can have little to no control over playback during operation. You have to compile songs into a soundtrack before starting and it just plays from song one all the way through to the end. What I'd really like is a SIMILAR program where you have three component windows. (my ideal program follows:)

The first window would be ambient sounds, here various background noises are grouped into catagories. The overall catagory has a volume slider and each individual item has a single button to reduce it slightly more that the overall ambience level. Each item in the catagory can also be turned to variable frequencies (constant, often, sporatic, rarely, off). A dungeon ambience could include torches burning (constant), moans and groans from people in pain (often), dripping water (sporatic), and chains ratteling (rarely). Additionally, instead of being stuck with the defualt options for ambience you could create a new ambience, you select which sounds (from those in all ambience packs on your hd) and give it a custom label so by combining the villiage/market square ambience with the forest sounds ambience I could custom make one for an elf village. (and several ambience packs would either have to come with the program or be avalible to download from the company's website).

Window two would be for mood music. Here you create a playlist from the songs in your library to play continuously (defualts to repeat all). During playback you can select what song you start with or switch to and any time it changes songs (from within the same playlist or changing from one playlist to another) it automatically fades the old song out as the new song fades in (is crossfade the term for this?). Like any media player it would have its own volume control but would defualt to just below the ambience/background volume (so both are heard but background sounds are slightly higher by defualt). Like with the ambience several songs and playlists are included and others can be downloaded from the website for a variety of generes and settings.

The third window would be for one shot sound effects, like what RPGDeck dose with it's second window. For this one I would just like better organization. This window would have three or more tabs at the top that you can change the labels on and each tab is just a quick button where you can load common sound effects by groups (like using one for combat, one for exploration, and one for in town). Before the game you just load up what tabs you wanna use and add what sound effects you want into each tab. Within the tabs you can also group the sound effects, and each group can be expanded and collapsed as needed. Like with RPG Deck sound effects would just be a one shot item, hit the button and it fires off but only then. Additionally for both the mood music and the sound effects you have the option to label the item. A labeled items is displayed by its label rather than file name (for those mp3s with long names and sound effects you wanna use for particular people/characters) but dose not actually change the file or filename on the computer.

Once all this is fixed to your liking you have options for saving as well, you can save the total set up (ambience, mood music, and sound effects) as a single file or save each individual window's setup (for backgrounds and mood music it basically saves it as a playlist or the equivilent). Every time you open the program it defualts to NOTHING LOADED, so you don't have to go and remove all the playlists/backgrounds/fx you set up for last weeks dengeon crawl before setting up for tonights sci-fi game. You open, load a total package you wanna use ,or opt to create a new sound setup.

With a new setup it starts by showing all ambiences in your library (including those you made custom and saved as single items) and asking you to choose what ones you want to load (including the option to create a new catagory as above). Once you have your ambiences loaded/created it asks you to either load a playlist(s) or create a new one (and you can copy one playlist to modify and create a new one). And finially it dose the same thing with fx; either load a package you've already made or start a new one. When making a new package you start with one tab, label it and add the sounds you want, then either add another tab or click finished and you are done.

The final thing its gotta have is the ability to use extrernal music, I keep ALL my music files on external hard drives (of all music types) and HATE when a program tries to move my files to its folder (Itunes dose this with my apps and I CANNOT get it to stop). Just tell the program the folder where you keep your music files, ambience files, and fx files and it dose not try to move them at all. (but you can store them in the program's defualt folder if you want, its just not a requirement).

Finially since this is a sound machine made specificlly for gaming purposes why not have plugins you can download and add for other game related purposes such as notes, character sheets folder, custom designed calender (with common/popular game calenders already perloaded), etc..

Yeah, now that I am reading it back to myself its kinda a long list but what the hell, its my ideal wish list anyway so why not shot the moon... I am almost tempted to try learning something about programing just to TRY and make it but lets face it, by the time I would have learned enough to make the attempt it would be obsolete already and I'd have to start over.

Richard

PS: I have been googling for a couple hours now trying to find something like this but didn't really expect to succeed and so far have not.

PPS: maybe I should have put this in the off topic jibberjaber forum... I've already taken it a long ways in that direction...

Check out and . Also, Winamp can show panes with the order genre/artist/album as one of six or so preselected setups, so I don't think that that's really what Apple's patent covered (the article you linked gives no such impression and the forum linked was...confused), but I find the entire panes thing to be pretty limited myself, so I never use it.

For database handling and user support AP is far superior to JRMC in my experience. I only use JRMC for tagging, sorting and cover image embedding.

Sorry, but I have downloaded all of the programs you suggested and I'm not impressed especially compared to iTunes.

Media Center was a reasonable approximation. I was more impressed by its ability to locate the grpahic images in one of my New Order directories.

I found MP3Toys to be the most fun.


But none of them can view music this way;

(This is what WinAMP used to be like.)

I've poked around lookin at some of the programs suggested here and liked several (DJ Studio 3 looks closest so far) but all of them seem to eat up reasources that my laptop may not have to give (hard enough getting it online). I am gonna check the rest of them out thoughout the week and prolly buy one by this weekend if I think my machine can handle it. While I have a large list of things I want I also want what I consider to be RPGDeck's strongest point (small and easy on older machines). Thanks for all the suggestions so far and if anyone knows something better feel free to share.

Richard