15.2 Player music

[Lolorndinfey]

*Is still reeling and convulsing from shock at the appearance of the QA dept*

You touch him. Do you feel and see him too? This is not some weird U15.2.3 hallucination?


I agree with the lute suggestions. Just don't know if they have access to sampling synthesizers that can blend in the bass as suggested. Like a Korg or Waldorf. Fingers crossed.

It's unfortunate that the missing notes still (not heard) appear on immediate re-play. That pretty much confirms it's not a caching issue.

Any of the parts hitting 6 simultaneous notes at a time?
What's the total note count when missing notes appear?
Memory usage? Does it make a difference if graphics on very high vs very low? Audio settings?

More directed for QA's focus on examining the problem. Hoping it's a coding issue rather than a hard limit reached.

****

Hausenpfeffer. 'Nuff said. and dont skimp on the malt vinegar.

[Splik]

Could the dropped notes be related to music system using UDP protocol instead of lossless TCP?

[Thurallor]

Could the dropped notes be related to music system using UDP protocol instead of lossless TCP?

I doubt that. Whatever the root cause is, it's something that is different in the live version vs. Bullroarer. I seriously doubt they've altered whatever basic protocol they're using under the hood.

My understanding is that the only major thing they've changed is upping the sampling rate on the instrument recordings (based on what somebody observed above about the new samples having a wider frequency spectrum). I could imagine an implementation of a mixer that would not be able to mix as many samples together when operating at a higher sampling rate.

[Tulipan]

Thank you for sending in your bugs regarding dropped notes and including the abc files where you see the problem most. ... Please keep the information flowing - we really appreciate it.
- Tybur (LOTRO Quality Assurance)

Yesterday members of my band and me played on Bullroarer for hours and as people came and went we got through a very varied collection of tunes, from 3- to 7- part arrangements. Overall we were very pleased, especially with the winds, theorbo, drums but we certainly also had the dropped notes issue with significant degradation of music quality in some cases.

In particular we noted dropped notes
- one fast-paced & sometimes very note-intense 7-parter where the dramatic bits sort of went *poof*
- tunes with not so many parts (down to 3) but where one or more of the parts is really a combination of several MIDI tracks

If Tybur (or anyone else using blue ink) asks for more examples, we could upload you the.abc of the above mentioned 7 parter or possibly make videos of it both on Bullroarer and on live for use in your work.

[Emere]

Yesterday members of my band and me played on Bullroarer for hours and as people came and went we got through a very varied collection of tunes, from 3- to 7- part arrangements. Overall we were very pleased, especially with the winds, theorbo, drums but we certainly also had the dropped notes issue with significant degradation of music quality in some cases.

In particular we noted dropped notes
- one fast-paced & sometimes very note-intense 7-parter where the dramatic bits sort of went *poof*
- tunes with not so many parts (down to 3) but where one or more of the parts is really a combination of several MIDI tracks

If Tybur (or anyone else using blue ink) asks for more examples, we could upload you the.abc of the above mentioned 7 parter or possibly make videos of it both on Bullroarer and on live for use in your work.

My suggestion is not to wait for them to ask for examples. Send in bug reports via the submit a bug link at the top of the page and add the .abc files you have experienced trouble with using the add a file feature. It saves them time and that is always a good thing. The more we can help them, the better. Be sure to tell them those files are having the dropped not issue.

[Emere]

*Is still reeling and convulsing from shock at the appearance of the QA dept*

Any of the parts hitting 6 simultaneous notes at a time?
What's the total note count when missing notes appear?
Memory usage? Does it make a difference if graphics on very high vs very low? Audio settings?

1. Not on the songs I submitted, though I have many that do, I never got that far to test the others in depth.
2. I don't know. I just know I can hear a loss of bass notes, a lot of bass notes, and a lot of the bagpipe notes as well. Enough you can easily tell the notes have been dropped.
3. When I box 6 toons, I normally use about 24% to 50% of my cpu depending on how many are in the crowd watching, and I never peak over 7.2 gigs of ram and have 16 gigs total. I also run on dx9 settings and always set to very low when boxing though I don't have to on my main account if I don't want to, but it seems to keep my gpu cooler, which is a GTX 650. Audio is on Sound Blaster Recon 3-D set to speakers on the sound blaster pci. I normally keep combat sounds ect turned down so I don't think that is the trouble being my friends who are on mother board sound are hearing the same loss. Also, I disable all sound on my alt accounts.

[Emere]

Also...stuff, things, more stuff....cosmetic bunny pets!
(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

[Amendoa]

Nice thread: everybody is contributing, unlike some threads where everybody just complains.

Music people are cool (i can't play a thing...)

[Tulipan]

My suggestion is not to wait for them to ask for examples. Send in bug reports via the submit a bug link at the top of the page and add the .abc files you have experienced trouble with using the add a file feature. It saves them time and that is always a good thing. The more we can help them, the better. Be sure to tell them those files are having the dropped not issue.

Done! Good advice.
Kittehs FTW!

[Lolorndinfey]

If I were to trying to diagnose the problem, it would help more if they had the .mid files to quickly inspect for instances where simultaneous notes were on each track/part. You can see instances where more than 6 notes are active much easier. I know this is a no no to some, but just thought I'd point it out for QA's sake on saving time.

Snowstorm in Boston today, right now apparently. Hope they make it safely into the office. I sent in two .abc as stress test examples. They light up my equalizer like a christmas tree, but play properly. Party on, Wayne.

[SchorschiSchrumpf]

I think a likely cause for the cutting out thing is that the new samples are too long - which means they occupy their slot in the mixer longer than the old ones and thus causing the drop outs.

Maybe they got some silence in the end which could be cut off?

The other candidate is that they are stereo instead of mono and take up twice the space.

[Splik]

There is no need for them to be stereo. Stereo comes when they are played in the 3D game.
Mono is fine, if they are stereo I would convert them to mono if I was dev.

[Elwenwing]

We did some testing again today and found some cases of dropped notes as well!

The first song we had issues with (9 parts with two lutes) missed many notes, mainly on flute and clarinet. Strangely enough, from our personal observations I do not think all players where having the same amount of notes missing, but it was dependent on our listening position.
We played the song a second time and the dropped parts were the same!

The second song we had issues with (seven parts with one lute), we played again with a harp on the lute part and that immediately cured the playback issues!

Any of the parts hitting 6 simultaneous notes at a time?
What's the total note count when missing notes appear?
Memory usage? Does it make a difference if graphics on very high vs very low? Audio settings?

1. The first song does not exceed more than six notes at a time on any part, the second probably does, but I do not have the midi file to check!
2. The total notes are quite hard to count! *chuckles* I do not expect them to be higher than max 64 at any time though! Still a raise of the max playing sounds to 128 on Bulroarer might be worth a try.
3. Memory usage is not the issue here I expect! I have 16gb and and have no problem with music playback on the live servers, and still plenty of memory and processor power to spare even on high settings. My audio settings are generic settings with the onboard sound of my motherboard.

Could it be that all songs reported having issues so far all have a high tempo on the lute parts?

I think SchorschiSchrumpf may well be right in his assumptions the new samples are longer than the old ones!

Thank you to Turbine for working hard on the music system! It is very much appreciated.

[SchorschiSchrumpf]

We did some testing again today and found some cases of dropped notes as well!

The first song we had issues with (9 parts with two lutes) missed many notes, mainly on flute and clarinet. Strangely enough, from our personal observations I do not think all players where having the same amount of notes missing, but it was dependent on our listening position.
We played the song a second time and the dropped parts were the same!

The second song we had issues with (seven parts with one lute), we played again with a harp on the lute part and that immediately cured the playback issues!



1. The first song does not exceed more than six notes at a time on any part, the second probably does, but I do not have the midi file to check!
2. The total notes are quite hard to count! *chuckles* I do not expect them to be higher than max 64 at any time though! Still a raise of the max playing sounds to 128 on Bulroarer might be worth a try.
3. Memory usage is not the issue here I expect! I have 16gb and and have no problem with music playback on the live servers, and still plenty of memory and processor power to spare even on high settings. My audio settings are generic settings with the onboard sound of my motherboard.

Could it be that all songs reported having issues so far all have a high tempo on the lute parts?

I think SchorschiSchrumpf may well be right in his assumptions the new samples are longer than the old ones!

Thank you to Turbine for working hard on the music system! It is very much appreciated.

What you described there is exactly the thing we usually called sample overload. We had to struggle a lot with that when arranging songs for the 24-TSO. I found a way to approximately calculate the sample load by looking at the length of the samples as played ingame and used that in my converter to warn the user from overloading, so far Maestro has no option for that but if this problem persists I'm sure he'll add it as well.

To explain: The string instruments (lute/harp/theorbo) play always a constant length tone even if the tone in the ABC is a short one.
So if you hit chords of a few tones on a string instrument in fast succession the samples of the last chord would still be playing when actually in the ABC file you're on a new chord already - those would be played in addition, so for fast chord-repetition you could easily end up using 32 or more samples with just one instrument (and 64 is the default max).

Lets hope that all they need to do to fix this is to cut of the new lute samples when their volume is almost zero!

edit: don't just cut them off, but fade them out to 0 in the last bits to avoid the clicking we have in the bagpipes!!

[Vyvyanne]

Based on the dropped notes and the need to get 15.2 out to correct other issues currently on Live, we have pulled the music changes from the build, so they will not be pushed to Live with 15.2. We will continue to look into the dropped notes problem and aim to have the music improvements out with U16.

[Cartman76]

Better safe than sorry

[palantorio]

Based on the dropped notes and the need to get 15.2 out to correct other issues currently on Live, we have pulled the music changes from the build, so they will not be pushed to Live with 15.2. We will continue to look into the dropped notes problem and aim to have the music improvements out with U16.

go turbine, go.
We all know it is hard work to satisfy us musicans/bands . But you can believe me, if everything is fine with U16 u will see and hear many new Songs , concerts and events. Sorry for not have a Music Update with U15.2, but i think no band will have dropped notes within their Songs.
You guys and Girls from turbine make a good Job now.
And thank you Vyvyanna for working a Little bit more at the new Music System.

[Tulipan]

Cheers Vyvyanne, that is excellent news!

There are so many excellent aspects of the music system changes and if you get rid of the showstoppers and polish it all you have the chance of creating something magnificent - keep at it and do not falter!

[Lavs]

yay! I was confident that we wouldn't have this go out to live, given the comment that there would only be one up date to the system other than possibly new instruments in the future, and that they were working much harder than last time to get things right - but nice to have it confirmed

Have been on BR a few more times and can't really add to what has already been said, just agree with everyone that the lute has issues. One thing I did do was halve the tempo on a couple of songs and the dropped notes reappeared (and this was not just a case of caching, as I had played through the songs a couple of times before going to the half tempo ones). I hope something will also be done about the individual dud notes to make the music system truly wonderful

[Swagman]

Based on the dropped notes and the need to get 15.2 out to correct other issues currently on Live, we have pulled the music changes from the build, so they will not be pushed to Live with 15.2. We will continue to look into the dropped notes problem and aim to have the music improvements out with U16.

I think almost all of us agree that waiting a little longer for the new music system in order to get it right is not a problem. And I for one want to say a big thank you for the great job you've done in keeping us updated during this process and for the hard work you're putting into it.

[SpiritusLOTRO]

Based on the dropped notes and the need to get 15.2 out to correct other issues currently on Live, we have pulled the music changes from the build, so they will not be pushed to Live with 15.2. We will continue to look into the dropped notes problem and aim to have the music improvements out with U16.

Excellent news. I must say that I've been impressed with all the Turbine staff involved with this element. So much so that I would suggest college communication departments (and game development programs) look at U15 and U15.2 as case studies in how different approaches can engender vastly different results for both the quality of a company's product and the valence of their customer community. But I'll not bore everyone with academics. =)

I cannot wait to test what improvements you guys make between now and U16 beta. Well, I can wait. And I will. You know what I mean! I'll be there ready to roll up the sleeves again.

[Gosuu]

Oh well. It'll be nice when we get it.

[Emere]

Based on the dropped notes and the need to get 15.2 out to correct other issues currently on Live, we have pulled the music changes from the build, so they will not be pushed to Live with 15.2. We will continue to look into the dropped notes problem and aim to have the music improvements out with U16.

That is excellent news! On behalf of my kin, myself, and all future cosmetic bunny pets....we thank you!

I would also like to thank everyone that has poured time and effort into testing and posting here as well. It is a grand thing to witness everyone pulling together in such a mature and professional manner here. ~bunnyhugs and kitty purrs!~

[robbie1435]

Based on the dropped notes and the need to get 15.2 out to correct other issues currently on Live, we have pulled the music changes from the build, so they will not be pushed to Live with 15.2. We will continue to look into the dropped notes problem and aim to have the music improvements out with U16.

WOOHOOO!!!!!!!! Best news ever!

[Urwendil]

Much appreciated