Having Your Own Music on CoX

I know this has been brought up in past Forums and Threads. Heck, I think I may brought it up long ago but forgot about it..hehe. So, I just wanted to revisit this idea again and see the pros and cons come out of the closet again.

First, this is how this would work:
You download songs from your your computer, ipod, MP3 Player or other portable music device, songs that you would want to hear while playing CoX. The music and songs would only be unique to the user, meaning no one else around you or if you're on a team can hear it unless they decide to open up the "music que" in their chat menu and see who is listening to what songs. Should they decide to "plug-in" they to can share that song.

The "music que" will allow others within a team to see what song you are listing to and vice versa. Should they decide to listen to that song, they would just "click" on it. It would look something like this:

MUSIC QUE:
Bad to the Bone
Dirty Laundry
Gimme All Your Lovin
etc,..
etc,...
etc,..

The highlighted bold song is the one that you are listing to. Your teammate can elect to listen to that song or any of the other ones within your list and vice versa. Should you leave the team, their music would end and they would have to go back to their list of music in their own"music que". Basically, this is a shared environment with music. Should you elect not to "share" you can disable the "view" music que feature so others cannot see what songs you are listing to. Should you chose to want to listen to the wonderful background music of CoX...hehe, you can turn off your music que.

So now come the Cons: I can probably throw out a few off the top of my head. First, there may be copyright problems with this even though others can only "listen" and not "download" your music. Not sure what or why but it may have something to do with music being shared electronically and the fact that NP Soft is not in any type of contractual agreement with outside music being played within the game. Second, how would CoX handle this type of coding within the game itself. Let's face it, having something like this might just put too much burden on the servers and what they can handle and might really bog the game down. So far, I can only think of two Cons but I am sure there are more you guys can think of.

Now the Pros: Being able to listen to your own music or music of others on a team while "in game". That's it. no more no less. Again, if you can think of some more good Pros, please share them.

In a nutshell, if all else fails, I'll just turn my volume down on my computer just enough to hear the background CoX chatter and then crank up my Stereo. Heck, this might be the best option available...lol!

Personally I'm perfectly fine with the way I do this already - disable ingame music and have winamp running in the background. I don't see any compelling reason to dedicate resources, possibly significant resources, to building something like this when an easy workaround is already available for arguably less hassle.

Not to mention streaming music requires a certain amount of bandwidth, both from the players which will annoy people on slower connections because they'll lag more and also from the server which has to relay all this stuff to other players. There's a reason MA arcs are limited to I think 150k, and it's not because their servers have tiny hard drives. It's because of the network traffic generated by them. Now, try that with 3-5mb music files and see how long it takes to kill the servers. Wouldn't be long if you asked me.

Frankly, none of that is necessary. If you want to listen to something else, run Winamp or MS Media Player in the background. You won't be able to access the play and volume controls unless you alt-tab to out of the game (or run it in a window, blech) but you can listen to whatever you like. Streaming music from one player to another would open up all kinds of problems, none of which are worth it to be able to listen to the same song as a team mate. Aside from the massive bandwidth issues, there's the fact that the record industry tends to fire lawsuit nukes at anything that even resembles a P2P app.

And personally, I'm not sure what the point of having a shared music queue would be exactly. Of course, I utterly fail to see the point of MySpace or Facebook, so I freely admit that where social networking is concerned, I just don't "get it" at all.

It has been said, but streaming possibly copyrighted music that the player may not even own legally is bad in a lot of ways. Copyright is one way, as the music industry has been trying (though failing) to put a crimp on the thing. Secondly, this is peer-to-peer live streaming. Just the logistics around that are unpleasant, because a lot of people have an upload speed less than a tenth of their download speed (I do).

As for the rest, it IS a good idea, but you can just follow Bill's advice and play your own music.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

you can do streaming music for free. I've played COH with Spotify running in the background. I also just sometimes have Media Player on.
I've got a keyboard that has a play/pause, stop and skip forward and back buttons on it, which work while the game is on, and it was cheap. I wouldn't be surprised if there was one that had a few more options on it for a bit more.

edit: I don't disagree with it as an idea, but think it'd be too much work for something not that many people would use, and there's already a way to listen to your own music, just not share it.

turn your computer speakers off and your stereo up vola!