EOF 1.7RC3

[drihscol]

Well, It would make syncing a whole lot easier, because Harmonix puts a song count-in, which the midi has to compensate for, moving the chart forward, requiring the midi to be moved backward.
Understand what I mean?

[raynebc]

You can just as easily insert silence and use a delay value for the chart. We've thought about trying to allow EOF to insert silence, but that would require re-encoding the audio and would lower the audio quality. I don't even know if FoF supports a negative chart delay. The most reliable thing to do is still probably to manually insert silence to the beginning of the chart, that's what Harmonix does as well.

[SUSAltd]

By the way, delay in the song.ini can't be negative.

[raynebc]

Well there you go. We'll see if we can get anywhere with inserting silence within EOF. The main benefit of this would be that you can easily allow the desired amount of lead in without going outside of EOF, and it could automatically adjust the chart delay.

If any audio experts out there can tell us if and how OGG files can be concatenated on a binary level to join them (removing the need to re-encode the chart audio), it could help us add this feature.

[jstump91]

A difficult question. I fully understand the desire not to reencode, not just due to how slow it would be but also due to the fact that generational loss will occur.

If the amount of silence is a multiple of the block size in which Vorbis encodes its packets, it would be possible (though quite involved) to pad the beginning of a stream with silence, preserving the encoded audio data bit-for-bit. I don't know how exactly, but it's a possibility. (I have more gory details if this interests you.)

The Ogg Vorbis mapping does have a provision for chaining, which works simply by concatenating one stream to another, but I strongly do not recommend using it. While libvorbisfile (which is what nearly all programs that simply need to grab audio from Ogg Vorbis files use to do so) supports it, very few programs that use libvorbisfile are fully prepared to deal with chained files, and in the official FoFiX song specification I am working on, chaining will be forbidden for that reason.

Personally, I'd just go with using the delay= directive in song.ini and allowing it to be adjusted within EOF.

[raynebc]

I'm going to look into a couple of the "OGG Video Tools":
http://en.flossmanuals.net/TheoraCookbo ... heoraFiles

As long as we can come up with an efficient way to create an OGG with the desired number of milliseconds of silence, having EOF insert padding could become a reality.

Edit:
Apparently, OGG streams can't concatenate as I'd hoped. They wrote stream chaining into the OGG spec for this purpose, but it's already been said that FoF will not support chained OGG files. This means that adding this feature to EOF will require re-encoding the OGG.

[NewCreature]

Actually, I just tested a file created with oggCat in FoF and it played both streams back to back as expected. This means we should be able to make an insert silence function that doesn't require re-encoding.

[SUSAltd]

Something annoying I've noticed is that when I change the tempo, I lose any custom HO/POs and Crazy Notes that I've added. I don't know if it's a bug or it's always been like that (or more unlikely, it's supposed to be like that), but it's pretty annoying to have to fix all my HO/POs and stuff everytime I change the tempo a bit.

[raynebc]

Confirmed and fixed in revision 486.

[beebe]

This version doesn't seem to be able to add drum fills. If you go to BRE and extend the notes to where you want it to be it doesn't write the notes as long notes to MIDI so drum fills and big rock endings don't work on this version.

[slashfan7964]

I just tried this. I had some problems with forced HO/PO's. They seemed to be marked ok in the editor itself, but when I played them, only 2 or 3 in a row actually worked, then you had to strum again, and back to the 2/3 forced ho/pos and so on. I can send you a midi if you want.

[raynebc]

This version doesn't seem to be able to add drum fills. If you go to BRE and extend the notes to where you want it to be it doesn't write the notes as long notes to MIDI so drum fills and big rock endings don't work on this version.

Confirmed and fixed in SVN revision 499

I just tried this. I had some problems with forced HO/PO's. They seemed to be marked ok in the editor itself, but when I played them, only 2 or 3 in a row actually worked, then you had to strum again, and back to the 2/3 forced ho/pos and so on. I can send you a midi if you want.

FoFiX doesn't support forced HOPOs. Are you saying that they aren't working in Phase Shift? If that's the case, then yes, please send me the chart files so I can investigate.

[slashfan7964]

Yeah it doesn't work in Phase Shift.

Hang on. Uploading now

-- Edit: October 24th, 2010, 4:12 pm --

http://www.mediafire.com/?wgtwbka51a01jr3


Here ya go

-- Edit: October 24th, 2010, 4:48 pm --

Found another issue:


If you mark forced ho/pos (on or off) then mark solos/sp phrases after, the forced ho/pos get deleted.

[raynebc]

I'm no longer able to reproduce the issue you mention regarding the HOPO statuses, it might have been one of the things that were fixed already. EOF 1.7RC3 is now available in the first post. Changes since RC2:

*The album tag is loaded from ID3/OGG tag during chart creation, if it is present
*Time signature changes can now optionally be imported/exported from/to MIDI
*Applied jstump's correction to the FoFLC makefiles
*Note statuses are now kept during paste/auto-adjust operations
*EOF now has the option to generate and insert silence at the beginning of the chart audio
*Fixed a save crash that could occur when importing a MIDI that is given an audio file shorter than the MIDI file itself
*Updates to FoFLC 2.35, ie. you can now import SRT subtitles
*Fixes an issue where drum fill and big rock endings were written incorrectly to the MIDI during save
*Corrects the writing of forced HOPO on/off phrases, which can be used in Phase Shift

The Time Signature handling is still very experimental, so please use it with the knowledge that it may not work. If it doesn't work, you can disable the option to import/export TS changes so defining them won't break your chart when you play it in FoF/Phase Shift. Please let us know if you find any problems.

[beebe]

When I try to import MIDI EOF immediately crashes under RC3