Hello all Emergence BASIC enthusiasts!
The Emergence Audio Engine (EAE) is approaching it's first milestone beta release! EAE is a music and sound effects library for the Emergence BASIC compiler. In development for over 6 years now the EAE features:
* Up to 512 simultaneous playing channels.
* Streaming audio support for WAV, WMA, MPEG, MP3*, ASF, OGG, and others (TBD).
* Amiga MOD support.
* DirectX or Windows Multi Media output drivers.
* 3D positional sound through the DirectX driver.
* CD Playback functions.
* Multi octave tone generation.
* Media recording.
* Multiple mixing drivers.
* Much more!
The EAE is a command library, meaning full integration into the Emergence BASIC development environment with no DLL's to distribute with your program. And best yet, no per-product licensing fees!
Comparable products sell for over $1000 for an unlimited license. You can reserve your copy of the EAE today for only $39.95 for a limited time.
Expected beta release is July 31st 2009, with full release by September. Final price to be determined but will be in the $100-$200 range, so by pre-ordering now you will save a bundle!
Watch this category for further announcements and demo programs.
[EDIT]
The beta is now available.
OK..Now that you've seen the announcement it is time for the background ;)
EAE started its life back in 2003 as the music library for IBasic Pro. At the time Idigicon was supposed to buy a commercial license for another product, but that company didn't want to "play nice" and kept changing the licensing requirements. Much discussion and deliberation ensued and the commercial product went by the wayside. They searched for many alternatives and asked if I could build one from scratch.
I did quite a bit of work on it, but they didn't want to give me what I wanted to complete it, since it wasn't part of the original deal. As you all know Idigicon and I parted ways long ago, and the audio engine sat in obscurity until just a few months ago. I dug out the source code, and realized that with the current capabilities of Emergence (classes, COM, forthcoming MMX support) that not only would it be easier to complete that it would be an excellent addition to the already available libraries.
Over the last two months I have worked on it here and there, and along with four beta testers, have gotten it to the point of usability and stability. We have been testing the core mixing code on a wide variety of systems, including windows 7 of course ;)
Questions are welcome.
Quote from: Paul Turley on June 27, 2009, 07:08:44 PMThe EAE is a command library, meaning full integration into the Emergence BASIC development environment with no DLL's to distribute with your program.
That's the way how it has to be. ;D
I am looking forward to the first demo and hopefully I'll have enough money to get it.
Barney
well done. yay. EB is complete. 8)
edit
will be complete
Quote from: Paul Turley on June 27, 2009, 07:08:44 PM
* Multi octave tone generation.
You mean I can finally create retro sounds and retro music for my retro-styled games ;D
You and Cameron both ;)
Just a note about the * after mp3
While we are including the ability for you to write programs and games that can stream MP3 music, it is up to you to comply with the licensing requirements of Thompson Multimedia.
http://www.mp3licensing.com/help/developers.html
Which is fairly lenient, if you sell less than 5000 copies of a game then no licensing is needed.
I have just bought it. Don't know what I'll do with it - hopefully I can build a CD management and player system for my CD collection or something. ;D ;D
Thanks Paul for keeping EB alive and kicking even if it does not make you mega-rich.....
Regards
Dennis
I've been waiting quietly patiently .. ever furlorn thinking it was only a pipe dream.. remembering just how dam easy it was to make and muck around with sounds wave forms (sine triangle square noise )reverb echo volume dutation .. all of that combine them in 4 voices (sound channels) of the good old C64 ;)
Paul knows just how much i've been after a programming language that supports this is a speedy small tight manner. (wav files have their place.. but to do a 1/2 second beep or grunt groan slash thud creek.. its way too much over head and way too cumbersome to write retro style games or even great 3d games where the masses of sound effect files are larger than the program itself lol..
so yes here i was sitting dreaming and thinking that the day i'd see it happen would never get here .. and then blam {yes another cool sound effect of yesteryear} out of nowhere Paul drags out the old code and starts working on it again..
This feature alone i think will be a major selling point if its quick enough and small enough
Now I still have to wait till i can afford it and till it comes out :( .. But at least at last its on its way..
;)
QuoteWhich is fairly lenient, if you sell less than 5000 copies of a game then no licensing is needed.
This is incorrect. For games, it goes by distributed copies, not sold copies. You can easily get 5,000 downloads in a day if you post a demo that gets linked to by a gaming site, blog, portal. MP3s are a no-go for games unless you can afford the $$.
(http://www.mp3licensing.com/royalty/images/Games.gif)
Quote from: Blue Steel on June 28, 2009, 07:41:54 AMNow I still have to wait till i can afford it
Same here :'(
Brice. There are always options, use lower quality wma or ogg files for your game demo, which saves space, and only include mp3 on sold copies. If you ever sell 5000 copies I don't think the $2500 would be an issue.
You can also chose the "grey area" method. ;) There are two options for EAE, one that uses DirectShow to play streams and another that has the built in decoder. If you use the DirectShow version of the library then there isn't an mp3 decoder in the software that you distribute.
I was just pointing out an error. I don't and never would, use MP3s in a game.
Either would I, just pointing out alternatives.
I actually prefer games that let me chose my own background music, some of the tracks included with games are just, well, not my cup of tea ;D I can understand a console title forcing you to chose from a set of included tracks, but a PC game? please.
Choosing your own background music is done all of the time on the iPhone and iPod Touch (I have neither) and people love it. It is a shame it is not more common on the PC.
Personally, I don't like game music (except for retro games), only sound effects. I always make a point of allowing sound and/or music to be turned off in my games.
The last game I made for the HYDRA console, I made a simple PC app that lets people create their own little background songs and save them in a a ringtone format which the HYDRA game can read. It should be VERY simple to port this game to the PC using the new sound engine and use it to read ringtones and generate the sounds.
I will say, that you have this working on XP/Vista/7 is amazing given the changes MS made to DirectSound in Vista and deprecating MCI in Vista. From the sounds of this, one (with some hard work) could create some custom multitrack studio software :o
QuoteI've been waiting quietly patiently .. ever furlorn thinking it was only a pipe dream..
As Journey sang "Don't Stop Believing" ;D
okay this is something that sounds qute cool i'm buying my copy as soon as i post this, thanks for all of your hard work paul
Thanks. It is well worth the reserve price.
Writing it has brought many improvements to the compiler as well, which I'll be releasing before the beta of course ;). Mainly with the 64 bit operators, but also with the debugger.
Paul.
I am in - another thing to add to the EB collection.
Ordered! Thanks :)
Added .asf files to the list. Of course it only plays the audio stream in the .asf file, but I am finding a lot of music encoded as such.
Paul
Any chance you could say how many kb this will add to the EXE?
Hard to be exact as I haven't separated all of the functions into separate source files yet, which is how the linker excludes them if they aren't referenced.
However if you were to use every function in the library at once, which is very unlikely, you would add about 250K in it's current form. Compared to fmod at over 2mb that isn't too bad ;)
There are places I can save size as well, for example during development I have a bunch of log and sine tables that are just created using the array continuation operator:
sinetable[0] = 1,5,7,9....
sinetable[8] = ....
which makes the code segments larger than they need to be. Creating them as assembly data takes a 1/3 of the space.
Paul.
Very nice ;)
I want XM music support, that's the only thing that makes sense for me.
I'm planning to buy it when I have spare time to work on a new project.
XM will be one of the supported formats.
Quote from: Paul Turley on July 07, 2009, 12:50:24 PM
XM will be one of the supported formats.
If you ever implemented SID support, you would have huge interest from outside the community, for a DLL/LIB version.
Just a reminder to everyone, you can reserve your copy of the library today for a fraction of the final release price.
http://www.ionicwind.com/forums/index.php/topic,3446.msg27512.html#msg27512
The link will only work until the beta release, so don't delay too long or you will miss out.
Paul.
I want to gather up some money to get in on this deal when I can but it probably won't be until next week.
The way things are going the beta release will most likely be a week earlier than expected!
Paul.
Wow! That's good news!
The first beta release of the Emergence Audio Engine is now available. Instructions have been sent to all reserve purchasers.
I will leave the reserve purchase link available until the end of the month, if you miss out you will need to wait until September to get it at retail prices.
Thank you, Paul.
And I will be blaming you when my wife yells at me for staying up all night. ;D
It won't install for me. I am using 1.735 (installed in default directory), and when I try and install the audio engine, it puts up an error message "emergence installation not found", with a blank console window also displayed.
*edit* I am sorry, I meant to post this and the precious post in the beta thread. Too many tabs open at once :(
No problems here. I am also using 1.735. It installed clean without any issues. Fired up the IDE and checked the EB Help/About which shows 1.735 and Audio Engine version 0.1. I haven't tried any demos or anything else.
The problem could be with your EB installation - try reinstalling 1.735? I recall a post somewhere where libraries or something have changed with the latest EB - could be that?
Dennis
The initial check it does is check the registry for proper keys, which is to make sure its not being installed for the demo version of Emergence.
If the key doesn't exist then it will fail the second check for version numbers.
Make sure your logged in as the correct user under XP as the registry keys are user based.
Paul.
QuoteThe problem could be with your EB installation - try reinstalling 1.735?
Actually I had just installed it moments before.
Seeing the console window in the background makes me think that the audio engine installer might be trying to work off of 8.3 compatible structure?
ok, you actually have to run EB after installing it before you can install the audio engine :-[
Just for interests sake, after clean-installing EB, you have to run it before installing any add-ons? Need to remember this for the future. It probably resolves library links etc. on first execution.
Dennis
So far no bugs found, but still haven't tried everything yet.
Last day to get your copy of the Emergence Audio Engine beta at the special price.
You can reserve your copy of the EAE today for only $39.95
If you miss out you can get the final release in September for $129.95
Thanks,
Paul.
I was asked by a couple of users if I could leave the beta purchase link open for at least another week while they come up with the purchase price.
Consider it done.
Paul.
Hello Paul,
just paid for mine . . .
Thank's
Dominique
What I wanted to do with the Audio Engine was to create an interface for generating (synthesizing) sounds and then saving them as wav or ogg files. Would this be possible?
It will be possible by the final. The tone generation functions, which are almost done, allow you to specify a base waveform and ADSR envelope, similar to Sonix on the Amiga. the resulting sample can be saved via the recording commands as a wav. I only have code for reading OGG at the moment, haven't thought of trying to save one yet.
It is my plans to create an interface for visually entering waveforms and applying filters before the ADSR stage.
Paul.
I think generating and saving WAV and OGG files would be a great feature.
I am hoping my wife gets the check in the bank today so I can order (it would be late tonight when I get home.)
Finally, I am definitely getting this tonight (if I am not too tired when I get home late) or tomorrow.
Where can I find help file for EAE ?
Quote from: paja on August 12, 2009, 12:00:43 PM
Where can I find help file for EAE ?
EAE hasn't been released yet. The help file will likely be in the release version.
In the .zip is a readme file, that outlines the working commands and their usage.
Hello,
Does this library have MIDI capabilities such as the ability to play several independent parts, each one on a different channel ?
Thanks in advance.
No. But Emergence already has multi channel MIDI capability with the playmidi$ command.
Should have the next update ready next week. Tone generation functions are done now, working on OGG stuff right now.
Paul.
How is EAE progressing?
Good, thank you.
Been working on the docs for the new functions.
Hey, just curious as to the % done you think the EAE is at... Personally, I've been too busy here to even download it yet, even tho I was so excited to do so when I pre-ordered it, just havent had the time.
Even the current beta is pretty usable IMO, but I think an user doc is required to fully utilize it.
It's nearly the end of October, I hope it can be progressing well.
Just an update. I am still working on EAE but was sidetracked by work over the last month or so. Back on it in my spare time and hope to have an update soon.
I've got a lot of days off coming up to work with it.
Paul.
Hi support
Is there any news of an update or upgrade from the product "Emergence Audio Engine". I'm licenced user of this an there is nothing to hear it. What about IWBasic.NET?
Best regards
Stephane
Nothing in current plans on either one right now.
LarryMc
Does anyone have some working code that you might be willing to post that shows how the streaming functionality works?
I'm particularly interested in streaming mp3's from a remote server, but it doesn't really matter what the target format is at this point... just want to see what a working model might look like.
Thanks,
Doc