QuakeSpasm and Darkplaces don't play CD music?

[Hyper Sonic]

I have the Quake 1 cd in the cd drive. The music plays from windows media player. However neither of these source ports plays the music. Do they only play music that has been ripped from cds?

[Lone Wolfe (Hoover1979)]

If your OS is Vista or higher you are better off ripping the CD to .OGG format and using the .OGG files, because after Windows XP CD Adio in games only plays once and no more music for the rest of the level unless you save and load. Looping from CD is no longer supported, so Using .OGG files is better.

I used a free program called FairStars CD ripper, and can make custom .OGG's with almost the same quality as lossless WAV's, of course this means over 400Mb of music files but it also means better sound quality. I used it to get better quality music in PowerSlave Ex by ripping from the CD so the 120Mb of music became over 500mb of music and sounds better.

I can't link you to the programs website for legal reasons ( it can be abused by Music Pirates) but google is your friend, just make damn sure you scan your download with at least 2 AV programs before opening it to make sure you are not getting Malware on your rig. Or just skip that step ans look for the .OGG files out there. I also can't share any links to the Quake .OGG soundtrack for legal reasons too (the Quake Soundtrack is copyrighted music and I don't want the RIAA sueing me for all I've got).

[Hyper Sonic]

Thanks for the reply. Do any rippers covert CD music tracks to WAV files? Lossless WAV files from CDs shouldn't total over 700MB or so as CDs were only 700MB, and I believe lossless WAV files are identical to CD in quality. Do these sourceports also support wav files for music? I know they do use wav files for sounds effects.

Or FLAC, lossless but compressed https://www.sony.com/electronics/rip-cd-transfer-lossless-digital-music-collection

Looks like Darkplaces can use ogg or wav for music https://icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/readme.html#SoundFeatures

Looks like Quakespasm can use mp3 or ogg or flac
http://quakespasm.sourceforge.net/Quakespasm.html#ss3.1

Sure wish they had a common lossless format, for Darkplaces I got to make wav, for Quakespasm I got to use flac.

[Eye of the Storm]

This guide is prettty helpful if you are trying to get the music running, and the guide has a direct download for the soundtrack: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=119489135. I use darkplaces and have the music downloaded as OGG files in a music folder in the Id1 folder for darkplaces.

[Hyper Sonic]

Just found out that the non sdl Darkplaces does play CD music from a cd player, but the sdl Darkplaces does not. I can't get either of them to play the wav file music I just ripped, arg!

EDIT: it works, I just made a typo, sounds instead of sound.

[Eye of the Storm]

Did you put the music files in the Id1 folder? That's how Darkplaces recognizes the files and plays the soundtrack.

[Hyper Sonic]

Yea I did, I just noticed that I made a typo, I did sounds not sound. Now it works, Darplacees playing the wav files ripped from the Q1 CD! Thanks.

[Hyper Sonic]

BTW Quakespasm will also play cd music ripped to .wav files, not just Darkplaces. Though ogg takes less space, and is compatible to both as well. Supposedly one also does mp3 while the other also does flac.

[Lone Wolfe (Hoover1979)]

Originally posted by 3DMightyMouse:

BTW Quakespasm will also play cd music ripped to .wav files, not just Darkplaces. Though ogg takes less space, and is compatible to both as well. Supposedly one also does mp3 while the other also does flac.

I wish all the Quake Engine ports could take WAV files. It's worth taking up the extra space for lossless CD quality Audio, instead of compressed digital audio.

[Hyper Sonic]

Should be easy to do, engine already plays wav files; the sound effects.
Flac should be just as good as wav. While it is compressed, it is also lossless. I doubt decoding would take many cpu cycles.

[Josephur]

In case anyone is trying to do this in 2020 with GOG's version of Quake and darkplaces:

The music is in game.cue and game.gog files (these are a CD image basically cue and bin file)

You can rip it to .wav using many tools, I used Linux's bchunk:
bchunk -w game.gog game.cue track

You can discard track1 as it was the binary track

So now you have all the wav files, just go to your darkplaces folder, and inside the id1 folder make a sound folder then a folder inside of that called cdtracks

Copy all your .wav files to this new folder.

Now they need to be named correctly, in my case I had to add an extra 0 to all the tracks.
Track002.wav up to Track010.wav

I decided to convert all of my .wav files to .ogg since darkplaces supports that, I used:
ffmpeg -i track000.wav -acodec libvorbis track002.ogg

Repeated the ffmpeg encoding for each file, and deleted all the .wav files afterwards. Launched up darkplaces, and had cd track sound, awesome!

Hope someone finds this useful.

[Wagoo]

This is so annoying.. I always used to play Quake with random (physical) audio CDs in the drive. Why on io do I now have to RIP each one? It kills the spontaneity of grabbing a CD

[Edward850]

Originally posted by Wagoo:

This is so annoying.. I always used to play Quake with random (physical) audio CDs in the drive. Why on io do I now have to RIP each one? It kills the spontaneity of grabbing a CD

CD Audio APIs aren't cross platform and usually require very specific and often deprecated device control interfaces, so source port authors tend not to maintain support for it due to the maintenance overhead.