Unified Music Format?

Community Community & Industry Discussion
1

Hi all,

In UE3, we had two different methods for playing music: on mobile, we could just play MP3s stored in the resources folder, and on PC we had to play WAV files that were imported into their own packages.

Would be great if this system could be unified, specifically so we can just play an MP3 (for file-size reasons).

Any plans for this kind of change?

Cheers,

Ed

2

Ok, checked Trello: there was an Audio Streaming task that said “PC-only solution delivered as experimental in 4.4”, but I don’t see it anywhere in the experimental options.

Anyone know what’s up?

3

The property is in the Editor settings in the Experimental category. The streaming system uses Opus to compress the SoundWave file to a streamable format. We will be extending it to other platforms in the future, but the timeline on that is not yet clear.

As for the mp3 question, we will not be supporting mp3 playback on PC. iOS has a hardware mechanism for playing mp3 without impacting application performance so it is a great solution for that platform, however, to my knowledge there are no mp3 decoding libraries that have licensing requirements that are compatible with our code base.

Our current thinking to make the iOS mp3 workflow better is to allow attaching an mp3 file to a SoundWave in the editor and at cook time place the file in the correct location and set up the calls appropriately avoiding the manual hook up and different behaviors per platform. As long as you’ve attached your mp3, then playing the SoundWave from blueprint or otherwise will initiate the mp3. I also don’t have a timeline for that work, but that is our current thoughts on how it will likely work.

4

The Fluendo MP3 decoder is MIT licensed, though its a gstreamer plugin and I dont know nothing about patent licensing requirements on MP3. https://core.fluendo.com/gstreamer/svn/trunk/gst-fluendo-mp3/

5

Yeah, if you dig down in to the license you get to the scary language in the patents section:

https://core.fluendo.com/gstreamer/svn/trunk/gst-fluendo-mp3/LICENSE

6

Yes. Probably porting one into UE4 as a subscriber is a real risk too, if even you from Epic don’t like to touch that. Software patents are evil :wink: