Why Is Audiosurf 2 less compatable with music then Audiosurf 1 currently?

[Dart_ace2ace]

I mean really I was hoping for an upgrade when I bought 2 but feel I havent even been able to get my moneys worth yet. Even songs I could play fine on Audiosurf 1 are not working on audiosurf 2 and I never even got to touch the youtube integration as I bought it too late (yes I could mostlikely go to the beta thing but I really dont want to). I feel like I am currently faced with being forced to convert all my music to wav files just to get past whatever file property is keeping the M4a and M4p files from working in AS2. I Know that in audiosurf 1 they had an Itunes decoder of some sort but I dont see that option here, if it isnt here then can someone tell me why? at the current moment it feels like Audiosurf 2 was made before audiosurf 1 if you just go by the features.... although I will admit the workshop integration is definitly a step forward, but I feel like it has come with the price of being less compatable with different music files. I know the dev doesnt communicate with the community much but does any one know if someone (the dev or modder ) is going to try to fix it or if there already is a fix for this. I really dont want to have to convert all my files to wav files.... it looses so much of the data I use for sorting my music.

[VisciousFishes]

I haven't logged many hours in either game but I can guess that the iTunes codec (m4a and M4p) licence was expensive and not worth the money they would have to pay for it.

Good news though in regards to m4a conversion. There are many different programs claiming to be file converting utilities which are limited to either formats available to you or bit rate or other false limitation that forces you to buy their software. Ignore all that nonsense and download Foobar 2000. It's open source and free (like free beer) and does batch converting to many different formats. You could try audacity (open source) or Sony sound forge or some oher proprietary software but the advantage Foobar has is it's essentially a media player with a converter algorithm as opposed to needing sound software knowledge.

I use a number of different recording softwares and I still rather use Foobar to convert to WAV and I rip in flac. My studio software doesn't use the iTunes codec either so if I want a sample or something I dip into Foobar, one button conversion later I am using high quality WAV or linear PCM. Batch or single track conversion is an option here too and you can save your favourite format as a default. It's quick too. A whole album (13 tracks) can be done in a few seconds.

I appreciate that you don't want to convert your whole collection of music, but I don't want you not playing tunes because of the iTunes codec issue.

[Dart_ace2ace]

Thanks for the reply, and I think I may try foobar, and just put the wav file versions in another place apart from all my other music.

On the bright side I remembered an old hard drive where I placed most of my music that I had put on a previous computer and it allowed me to play more music (although not much). I actually realized a difference between the MP3's I was able to play and the MP3's I wasn’t. Almost all of the MP3's that I was not able to play I downloaded (from online or CD) using iTunes. The music I was able to play were brought into iTunes after downloading from CD's using Windows media player (from before I started using iTunes). So basically, as long as I don’t use iTunes to download a song to my computer then I think I would be able to play it. In the end most of my problems seem to stem from using iTunes. so I basically should have just transferred my older music files to this computer rather than redownload them from my CD's and iTunes and I may not have had so many problems. In any case thanks for the explanation.

By the way, I never knew that you had to pay for codec licensing for a program. When I need them, I usually am able to solve the problem by downloading a piece of software that installs it for me, but I guess including it in a program would require a license of some sort. It just never came to mind before now.

[VisciousFishes]

Some codecs are open source, like FLAC (free, lossless audio codec) and are supported by many other platforms. Some like WAV are open source/ no proper author.

E.g. MP3 was done and is owned by moving picture experts group (mpeg).

The Blu-ray codec is made by Sony and Blu-ray disc association. That's why you don't have a Blu-ray player natively in windows.

Often these things are bundled into software or there's an encoder on the open source, like lame for MP3.