Sound/Movie Partial Playback

[PyTom]

As of Ren'Py 6.99.9, it will be possible to play back portions of an audio or video file.

The syntax I've chosen for this feature involves angle brackets at the start of the filename string, which contain optional start and stop times, separated with a dash.

The audio filename "<-15.5>karaoke.ogg" will play the first 15.5 seconds of karaoke.ogg. The filename "<22->karakoke.ogg" will play from 22 seconds to the end of the file. The missing portion could be played with "<15.5-22>karaoke.ogg", which plays for 6.5 seconds.

The reason for this syntax is that Ren'Py already uses strings to represent sound files, and so it's easier to pass this around a "filename", rather than dealing with special objects, syntax, etc.


Notably, this will allow one of the most requested features. Using code like:

Code: Select all

play music "neverending.ogg"
queue music "<12.2->neverending.ogg"

It's possible to play a song that has an intro, and then seamlessly loop a section of that song, using only a single file.

[korova]

What a great piece of news!
I've been dreaming about this feature for a long time...

Thanks for this, Pytom!

[jack_norton]

Cool that will be useful in some cases

[AXYPB]

How precise can time arguments be?

[uyjulian]

Is it possible to play by samples as well as by seconds?
If so, this update will be even nicer... since giant floating point numbers is annoying

[PyTom]

I'm planning on floating point times, since this happens after sample rate conversion.

[csky]

This is great! Thank you for this feature, it will be very useful compared to fiddling around with dozens of different tracks.

Question: Will there be the possibility to fade out the track into itself, so that sounds that have tails won't be jarringly stopped?
For example, if you are playing between point A and B, when the loop point is reached, A starts playing again, but the tail of B(A few milliseconds after point B) fades out while A starts playing.

[PyTom]

I've tweaked this a bit, so the syntax is a lot of more understandable and extensible. Here are some examples:

* "<from 5.5 to 10.75>foo.ogg" plays foo.ogg from the 5.5 to the 10.75 second points. You can also use the from and to clauses individually.

* "<loop 3.21>bar.ogg" will play bar.ogg all the way through once, and then on the second and later loops, start 3.21 seconds in.

* "<silence 1.5>" will play 1.5 seconds of pure silence. (Note that no filename is required.)

csky>>> I don't think what you want makes sense to include in Ren'Py. It's the domain of digital audio programs that can do beat-matching and so on. I think it makes sense to pre-bake that overlap into the end of the track, and then loop back to a clean part in the middle.

[ReAnimator]

Hi,
is it possible to specify the frame instead of time for video playback?

[PyTom]

No, other than by converting.

[ReAnimator]

Thanks, PyTom.
I'm not used to work with this unit but it works alright.
This is really great, powerful feature. Really appreciate that you implemented!