MP3 in demos (oh no, not again!)
Introduction
MP3 in demos will cause the downfall of mankind, planets will explode, millions of PCs will die, everyone connected to the net will get a slight cold, penguins will rule the universe... oh.. and this stoopid author will be repeatedly hit over the head with large, heavy objects.
Thus leading to the new phraze in the C++ programming joke book:
O.O.P.S. I've killed TAD
(Yeah, I promise next year to buy some more expensive Christmas crackers so the quality of my jape material will improve.)
Funny mode off
Okay, we have had quite a large number of articles in recent Hugi's (hmmm.. hey Adok, should this be "Hugies"?? what the correct plural for "Hugi"?) and most had a negative basis against the use of MP3's in demos, well I'm not going to follow that trend (well, maybe just a tad ;)).
MP3s are evil!!
In fact I like the idea and the technology behind this new music craze. With all the nifty MP3 players, codex software and research it looks like we will be seeing MP4, MP5 and so on for a long time to come. I really liked the Bomb - State Of Mind demo because it's a superb demonstration of sound and graphics in almost prefect sync. They feed off each other and help to create a truly memoriable demo. I would class it up there with the classic Future-Crew demo, 2nd Reality. Far too many demos have nice effects and new music, but they don't appear to react with each other. The music plays and the graphics... er... graph. ;) Both the musician and coder(s) needs to work closely with each other to intergrate the visuals and audios. If the music stops for a dramatic restart then, IMHO, so should the visuals. Using an obvious example, take the bass drum to trigger the morphing or movement of your 3d objects, or camera movement. I know that music is often added much later to an almost finished demo/intro and this is why the interaction between samples and pixels is sometimes disappointing.
Think of it this way... Would a Jean Michel Jarre concert be half as good if he removed all his lasers and visuals? or if he showed a laser show without any music?
Coding is an art, tracking music is an art, creating graphics is an art and so too is putting it all together. You only have to think about a film to realise this. You might have beautiful scenary, great acting, fantastic music but if the film editor sucks... well.. the magic of the film is destroyed. Can you remember watching really bad B-movies where the continuity was really bad, the lighting jumps, parts of the film crew are caught on camera and the end of sentences are cut off.
MP3 XMs?
Many have attacked MP3 as being an easy way out, but I think it's more of a new technique, a new toy to experiment with, which still needs to be fully developed and throughly explored. The advantages of MP3 is obvious, high compression rates and reasonably high quality sound. On the down side the decompression can take a large chunk of CPU time, this will no doubt reduce as new tricks and improvements to the compression take place.
I wonder if some of the people who criticise the use of MP3s are really attacking the 'simple' tracking of the music (or rather the lack of the normal MOD tracking and sample mixing). I wonder if a .XM mod tracker which used MP3 to compress each, individual instrument sample would make these people more happy. This could be an interesting new field to explore and may give some respect to those MP3 users. Maybe someone will develop a realtime MP3 mixer, maybe some company will build it in hardware.
Closing words
I guess we will see much more of MP3s and other codex techniques in demos in the future, and of course hardware acceleration will become a necessary evil (some new motherboards have built-in Voodoo 3 video cards). With each operating system supporting more and more features as standard soon we may see some incredibly small intros and demos using the available codexes and libraries.
As sound hardware gets more powerful, graphics processors faster, memory gets ever closer to infinity and CPU clock frequencies get higher than a NASA drug's addict during a LSD trip to Mars, there is only major hurdle in programming left to conquer....
...what to do with all this CPU power!