PyWeek - Reminder to everyone about MP3s

Just in case someone doesn't know this yet, as there are some entries that have music in mp3-form: The Windows distribution of Pygame doesn't support mp3s, so your game won't work for any Windows users. Please use oggs instead.

— shang on 2006/04/03 16:05 of Opioid

Comments: (log in to comment)

By ciw42 on 2006/04/03 16:09:

Aye. You get a much better quiality/compression ratio, and they don't have any of those nasty licencing issues either.

By Jay on 2006/04/03 16:18:

Mp3's also don't work by default on macs either. I've been commenting out .mp3 loads if I run into them just to play the game.

By aerojockey on 2006/04/03 17:27:

We Linux users deal with this crap daily. Windows users can live with a few hand-edits. :)

Seriously, a set of compatibility guidelines would be helpful.

  • uncondtionally playing of MP3, MIDI in pygame
  • case-sensitivity of filenames
  • what else?

By shang on 2006/04/03 17:53:

  • using os.path.join instead of hardcoded path separators
  • In would-be-nice category for Windows users: use file extensions on READMEs (.txt) and startup scripts (.py)

By PyTM30 on 2006/04/03 20:49:

I thought you just had to have smpeg to play mp3s, or is that just under linux?

By Jay on 2006/04/03 21:02:

Smpeg doesn't work under os x. Ogg seems to have support on linux/win32/os x though.

By richard on 2006/04/03 22:02:

os.path.join isn't strictly necessary, as the '/' path separator works on all platforms.

These hints should go on the pygame wiki, which I could then reference from the pyweek help page.

PyTM30: Ubuntu Linux doesn't have MP3 playing installable by default because of the licensing issues. It's just easier if you stick to Ogg which is also a much better-quality sound format.

By philhassey on 2006/04/03 22:15:

you know -- i'm not sure about that "os.path.join isn't strictly necessary, as the '/' path separator works on all platforms." -- i think i have had cases where using / didn't work under windows...

but i can't remember for sure what the issue was, i just remember having some troubles getting dynamite working under windows last time due to my non-usage of os.path.join

maybe i'm just imagining that ;)

By TenjouUtena on 2006/04/03 22:41:

Using .sh scripts to start thinks is another worst practice by the Linux squad. :) Also a lot of people don't know how to open .tgz or .tar.gz on windoze. The only time that I've had problems with '/' not working as a path separator is when I was working with the win32 automation stuff.

By ciw42 on 2006/04/03 22:55:

For Windows, just grab a copy of 7zip from www.7-zip.org. A very nice, free little GUI based program that will uncompresses pretty much any format you could want. The compression is also pretty impressive.

By richard on 2006/04/04 01:27:

I thought .tgz was automatically recognised under Windows these days??

Ignore my advice about the path separator thing. Always use os.path.join. I shouldn't have said otherwise.

By Treeform on 2006/04/04 20:19:

i progrom in windows and i always use linux path with a '/' and in never fails me yet ...