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• Adding A New System To The Game Music Website

  1er août 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General

  At first, I was planning to just make a little website where users could install a Chrome browser extension and play music from old 8-bit NES games. But, like many software projects, the goal sort of ballooned. I created a website where users can easily play old video game music. It doesn’t cover too many systems yet, but I have had individual requests to add just about every system you can think of.

  The craziest part is that I know it’s possible to represent most of the systems. Eventually, it would be great to reach Chipamp parity (a combination plugin for Winamp that packages together plugins for many of these chiptunes). But there is a process to all of this. I have taken to defining a number of phases that are required to get a new system covered.

  Phase 0 informally involves marveling at the obscurity of some of the console systems for which chiptune collections have evolved. WonderSwan ? Sharp X68000 ? PC-88 ? I may be viewing this through a terribly Ameri-centric lens. I’ve at least heard of the ZX Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC even if I’ve never seen either.

  No matter. The goal is to get all their chiptunes cataloged and playable.

  Phase 1 : Finding A Player
  The first step is to find a bit of open source code that can play a particular format. If it’s a library that can handle many formats, like Game Music Emu or Audio Overload SDK, even better (probably). The specific open source license isn’t a big concern for me. I’m almost certain that some of the libraries that SaltyGME currently mixes are somehow incompatible, license-wise. I’ll worry about it when I encounter someone who A) cares, and B) is in a position to do something about it. Historical preservation comes first, and these software libraries aren’t getting any younger (I’m finding some that haven’t been touched in a decade).

  Phase 2 : Test Program
  The next phase is to create a basic test bench program that sends a music file into the library, generates a buffer of audio, and shoves it out to the speakers via PulseAudio’s simple API (people like to rip on PulseAudio, but its simple API really lives up to its name and requires pages less boilerplate code to play a few samples than ALSA).

  Phase 3 : Plug Into Web Player
  After successfully creating the test bench and understanding exactly which source files need to be built, the next phase is to hook it up to the main SaltyGME program via the ad-hoc plugin API I developed. This API requires that a player backend can, at the very least, initialize itself based on a buffer of bytes and generate audio samples into an array of 16-bit numbers. The API also provides functions for managing files with multiple tracks and toggling individual voices/channels if the library supports such a feature. Having the test bench application written beforehand usually smooths out this step.

  But really, I’m just getting started.

  Phase 4 : Collecting A Song Corpus
  Then there is the matter of staging a collection of songs for a given system. It seems like it would just be a matter of finding a large collection of songs for a given format, downloading them in bulk, and mirroring them. Honestly, that’s the easy part. People who are interested in this stuff have been lovingly curating massive collections of these songs for years (see SNESmusic.org for one of the best examples, and they also host a torrent of all their music for really quick and easy hoarding).
  
  In my drive to make this game music website more useful for normal people, the goal is to extract as much metadata as possible to make searching better, and to package the data so that it’s as convenient as possible for users. Whenever I seek to add a new format to the collection, this is the phase where I invariably find that I have to fundamentally modify some of the assumptions I originally made in the player.

  First, there were the NES Sound Format (NSF) files, the original format I wanted to play. These are files that have any number of songs packed into a single file. Playback libraries expose APIs to jump to individual tracks. So the player was designed around that. Game Boy GBS files also fall into this category but present a different challenge vis-à-vis metadata, addressed in the next phase.

  Then, there were the SPC files. Each SPC file is its own song and multiple SPC files are commonly bundled as RAR files. Not wanting to deal with RAR, or any format where I interacted with a general compression API to pull a few files out, I created a custom resource format (inspired by so many I have studied and documented) and compressed it with a simpler compression API. I also had to modify some of the player’s assumptions to deal with this archive format. Genesis VGMs, bundled either in .zip or .7z, followed the same model as SPC in RAR.

  Then it was suggested that I attempt to bring SaltyGME closer to feature parity with Chipamp, rather than just being a Chrome browser frontend for Game Music Emu. When I studied the Portable Sound Format (PSF), I realized it didn’t fit into the player model I already had. PSF uses a sort of shared library model for code execution and I developed another resource archive format to cope with it. So that covers quite a few formats.

  One more architecture challenge arose when I started to study one of the prevailing metadata formats, explained in the next phase.

  Phase 5 : Metadata
  Finally, for the collections to really be useful, I need to harvest that juicy metadata for search and presentation.

  I have created a series of programs and scripts to scrape metadata out of these music files and store it all in a database that drives the website and search engine. I recognize that it’s no good to have a large corpus of songs with minimal metadata and while importing bulk quantities of music, the scripts harshly reject songs that have too little metadata.

  Again, challenges abound. One of the biggest challenges I’m facing is the peculiar quasi-freeform metadata format that emerged as .m3u that takes a form similar to :

  #################################################################
  #
  # GRADIUS2
  # (c) KONAMI  by Furukawa Motoaki, IKACHAN
  #
  #################################################################
  nemesis2.kss::KSS,62,[Nemesis2] (Opening),2:23,,0
  
  nemesis2.kss::KSS,61,[Nemesis2] (Start),7,,0
  
  nemesis2.kss::KSS,43,[Nemesis2] (Air Battle),34,0-
  
  nemesis2.kss::KSS,44,[Nemesis2] (1st. BGM),51,0-
  
  [...]
  

  A lot of file formats (including Game Boy GBS mentioned earlier) store their metadata separately using this format. I have some ideas about tools I can use to help me process this data but I’m pretty sure each one will require some manual intervention.

  As alluded to in phase 4, .m3u presents another architectural challenge : Notice the second field in the CSV .m3u data. That’s a track number. A player can’t expect every track in a bundled chiptune file to be valid, nor to be in any particular order. Thus, I needed to alter the architecture once more to take this into account. However, instead of modifying the SaltyGME player, I simply extended the metadata database to include a playback order which, by default, is the same as the track order but can also accommodate this new issue. This also has the bonus of providing a facility to exclude playback of certain tracks. This comes in handy for many PSF archives which tend to include files that only provide support for other files and aren’t meant to be played on their own.

  Bright Side
  The reward for all of this effort is that the data lands in a proper database in the end. None of it goes back into the chiptune files themselves. This makes further modification easier as all of the data that is indexed and presented on the site comes from the database. Somewhere down the road, I should probably create an API for accessing this metadata.

• Announcing the first free software Blu-ray encoder

  25 avril 2010, par Dark Shikari — blu-ray, x264

  For many years it has been possible to make your own DVDs with free software tools. Over the course of the past decade, DVD creation evolved from the exclusive domain of the media publishing companies to something basically anyone could do on their home computer.

  But Blu-ray has yet to get that treatment. Despite the “format war” between Blu-ray and HD DVD ending over two years ago, free software has lagged behind. “Professional” tools for Blu-ray video encoding can cost as much as $100,000 and are often utter garbage. Here are two actual screenshots from real Blu-rays : I wish I was making this up.

  But today, things change. Today we take the first step towards a free software Blu-ray creation toolkit.

  Thanks to tireless work by Kieran Kunyha, Alex Giladi, Lamont Alston, and the Doom9 crowd, x264 can now produce Blu-ray-compliant video. Extra special thanks to The Criterion Collection for sponsoring the final compliance test to confirm x264′s Blu-ray compliance.

  With x264′s powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it’s quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality. With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user.

  To celebrate this achievement, we are making available for download a demo Blu-ray encoded with x264, containing entirely free content !

  On this Blu-ray are the Open Movie Project films Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream, available under a Creative Commons license. Additionally, Microsoft has graciously provided about 6 minutes of lossless HD video and audio (from part of a documentary project) under a very liberal license. This footage rounds out the Blu-ray by adding some difficult live-action content in addition to the relatively compressible CGI footage from the Open Movie Project. Finally, we used this sound sample, available under a Creative Commons license.

  You may notice that the Blu-ray image is only just over 2GB. This is intentional ; we have encoded all the content on the disk at appropriate bitrates to be playable from an ordinary 4.7GB DVD. This should make it far easier to burn a copy of the Blu-ray, since Blu-ray burners and writable media are still relatively rare. Most Blu-ray players will treat a DVD containing Blu-ray data as a normal Blu-ray disc. A few, such as the Playstation 3, will not, but you can still play it as a data disc.

  Finally, note that (in accordance with the Blu-ray spec) the disc image file uses the UDF 2.5 filesystem, which may be incompatible with some older virtual drive and DVD burning applications. You’ll also need to play it on an actual Blu-ray player if you want to get the menus and such working correctly. If you’re looking to play it on a PC, a free trial of Arcsoft TMT is available here.

  What are you waiting for ? Grab a copy today !

  UPDATE : Here is an AVCHD-compliant version of the above, which should work better when burned on a DVD-5 instead of a BD-R. (mirror)
  

  What’s left before we have a fully free software Blu-ray creation toolkit ? Audio is already dealt with ; AC3 audio (aka Dolby Digital), the format used in DVD, is still supported by Blu-ray, and there are many free software AC3 encoders. The primary missing application is a free software Blu-ray authoring tool, to combine the video and audio streams to create a Blu-ray file structure with the menus, chapters, and so forth that we have all come to expect. But the hardest part is dealt with : we can now create compatible video and audio streams.

  In the meantime, x264 can be used to create streams to be authored using Blu-Print, Scenarist, Encore or other commercial authoring tools.

  More detailed documentation on the new Blu-ray support and how to use it can be found in the official commit message. Do keep in mind that you have to export to raw H.264 (not MKV or MP4) or else the buffering information will be slightly incorrect. Finally, also note that the encoding settings given as an example are not a good choice for general-purpose encoding : they are intentionally crippled by Blu-ray restrictions, which will significantly reduce compression for ordinary non-Blu-ray encoding.

  In addition to Blu-ray support, the aforementioned commit comes with a lot of fun extras :

  x264 now has native variable-framerate ratecontrol, which makes sure your encodes get a correct target bitrate and proper limiting of maximum bitrate even if the duration of every frame is different and the “framerate” is completely unknown. This helps a lot when encoding from variable-framerate container formats such as FLV and WMV, along with variable-framerate content such as anime.

  x264 now supports pulldown (telecine) in much the same fashion as it is handled in MPEG-2. The calling application can pass in flags representing how to display a frame, allowing easy transcoding from MPEG-2 sources with pulldown, such as broadcast television. The x264 commandline app contains some examples of these (such as the common 3:2 pulldown pattern).

  x264 now also exports HRD timing information, which is critical for compliant transport stream muxing. There is currently an active project to write a fully DVB-compatible free software TS muxer that will be able to interface with x264 for a seamless free software broadcast system. It will likely also be possible to repurpose this muxer as part of a free software Blu-ray authoring package.

  All of this is now available in the latest x264.

  http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/bluray%20fail.png

• Revision 31962 : On ne voit les boutons d’actions que lorsqu’on a la souris sur une entrée. ...

  7 octobre 2009, par rastapopoulos@… — Log

  On ne voit les boutons d’actions que lorsqu’on a la souris sur une entrée. L’interface est donc beaucoup plus lisible.