Bug/Issue One song music loop/Music Mods not working/Basically What Happened to Music

As if the variety of music wasn't already stunted enough, it seems within the last update (or two?) the music tends to pick a song upon loading onto a planet, and it plays that song and only that song in an endless loop until you leave the planet and come back.

This bug, is apparently still a thing as well.
http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/day-night-music-transition-broken.122234/

Lastly, I can't seem to get any mod that adds music to play the songs added from mods, be they additional songs, or even to add missing songs from the OST back from the game's assets. The only modded songs I hear is anything that is added to the main menu. In the actual game, nothing. It's like I'm stuck listening to the same music no matter what I do, besides listening to music externally.

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Even if all that were fixed in the future, it still doesn't fix the more major problem. Despite several threads both from me and others posting the same issues, I'm curious as to the reason of a large portion of the OST not making it to the actual game, as so far I haven't gotten any concrete answers other than people guessing it didn't make the cut.

If that's the case, why has the "updated" version of the OST (from Humble Bundle at least) removed the "Experimental" label from the name of the song files then? If they're no longer experimental, where are they?

(All of this music was previously labeled as experimental. I can tell this because I have both versions of the OST: the one way back years ago, and the one updated now.)

Triggered battle music was removed early in the beta, none of the "Exploration" songs in any of the biomes (Forest Exploration, Desert Exploration, Arctic Exploration, Ocean Exploration and so on etc. are in either. (Yes, I'm coloring for emphasis. That's how much was cut out. ) So that's, what half the soundtrack? Really the only varied music you hear is when you go through the different missions in the game's main storyline, of which you're most likely only going to go through once, so that's another 25% or so of the music as well. I think I've heard maybe the Crystal music once, some funk/jazz in Alien biomes, and even then I read that a Desert exploration song is actually being played incorrectly in that biome as well for some reason.

In fact, other than the main storyline, and the battle music, (all which was removed when battle music triggers was cut entirely) I haven't heard any new songs from the beginning of development through the entirety of the game's EA period. And sadly 1.0+ is no different.

The majority of the player's time spent is on an actual planet of any particular biome, be it exploring, crafting or building. It's something you're going to be doing a lot of, and forever onward after beating the main storyline, and all you hear is the same 10 or so piano/spacey songs. That's it. They're beautiful songs in their own right, but they're all the same pace. Am I the only one that thinks "Forest_Battle_1" is flippin awesome to listen to? (Despite it sounding more of an exploration song actually.)

I know I can just play the OST or whatever I want in the background, but it's a different feeling when it's all triggered accordingly.

 

Personally I muted the SB music because I like to run around with the in game instruments and play the music from there, but there isn't much there to pick from tbh, I can only listen to fur elise so many times xD.

 

Bit of an update, I tried making a new character and the music mods work all of a sudden. Is the music somehow corrupt with my main character whom I spent so much time on? I still think I get the endless looping though.

However, removing all music mods entirely fixes the looping guaranteed.

 

Most likely it is the PLANETS, not the CHARACTER.

When you land on a planet, the music data for some really really weird reason is saved in the planet's .world file. If you make a new character, you will very surely find new planets and thus get the new unglitched music.

I once had a character in Frackin'Universe with Frackin'Music installed, and Chucklefish moved a certain music file, and I had built a home on an FU planet-type.

Well, what happens, is anytime the game chooses that track, I get silence with an AssetException error in my logs.

Even though FU and FM have been updated with the correct filepath to that song, that character STILL gets that error every time that track comes up, because the music tracks are recorded in the planet's .world file which is a really weird way to do things.

 

Yeah, the author of the "Missing Music Addition" mod on the Steam workshop said the same thing, with planets saving the song files to that planet.

The thing is I'm traveling to planets like 500,000,000 coordinates away (more than enough for new generation to happen) and still getting the same problem.

 

That's overkill, lol. All you need is a new planet, in fact you could just delete a planet's .world file to force the game to re-generate another copy of that planet.

Now, speaking from experience after reading your OP again, is when I first installed Frackin'Music, I experienced much of the same problems you did: I'd hear nothing but the same 3 vanilla tracks again and again and again for a long while before other tracks finally started to play and now I hear them quite often.

Not sure what's up with the looping issue, though. I've never had that problem. A song will play once, sometimes loop... but when I change layers (go underground to where you hear cave ambience or high in the sky), or day/night transition, the music changes as it should.

 

Yay! *insert Reward Bag sound here*

I seemed to of finally got this to work. Through testing with new/old characters on different universes in an overly long process I'm not going to explain, I've concluded that music mods aren't as "client-side" as it seems. I tried new/old characters on my single player universe with new planets, and bam, new music appeared for both. But they never work on the server.

So then I uploaded the mods on my server. Bingo, new music is playing, on new planets at least so far that I tested. So far new music seems to play once every 2 or so vanilla tracks, which is fine enough for me. Although what still seems to be a thing is that whatever track the game picks it still loops it until a day/night transition, unless the game was always like that.

So despite music mods being described as client-side, it seems this is only true in regards to not making other players crash who don't have it. If you're playing on a dedicated server, it seems the server still needs those music files in order to generate planets with those tracks, otherwise it's not going to matter if the player has the mod or not. It won't play without them.

 

So this is like, you enter the planet, one music plays and never stops, even when you sit on the planet for several days and nights? Had that too, got so bored of infinite accretion discs and stuff like that and just turned off music to listen to my own in aimp. It clearly wasn't like that before.

 

You can always beam to your ship and then beam back down to force the game to play something different.

Save+Exit also works, if you don't want to lose your place.

 

I asked my friend (who doesn't have any music mods) if the song repeats for him until time change, and he said it did. So it's like that for everybody.

Ok, so it IS a bug then. I can't remember if the game was always like that, or just recently. Although for me it changes the song at dawn and dusk. It used to just do one song endlessly until I...unfortunately redid my character and /admin'ed him to death through the quests again.

The reason why it's annoying is some of the FU planets have extremely long days, so I'm stuck listening to the same song until transition.

 

Have you tried Frackin'Music? Yes I know it's 650MB, but the variety is very much worth it (though a few songs are kinda.. 'eh' choices for certain planets, but most of it is reasonable).

And yes, sometimes I see the "infinitely looping song" like the game forgets that it's supposed to change the song at day/night transitions and when the player changes depth (Sky/Surface/Underground/Core).

 

Yes I have it. Combined with Clever Advisor's additions, but at this point I'm considering removing them and just having Frackin.

Was the game always looping the song until the transition with the recent update, or would it actually properly change the song after one play? (While still in the day/night time.) We've been in 1.05 for so long I can't remember.

 

Uh, from what I recall from Nightly... I think the game always chose 1 track and played it until Night/Day/Depth transition. If this lasted longer than the music file, it would simply loop until a transition occurred.

Frackin'Music, I know for a fact, does not in any way alter how the engine chooses music, other than to expand a biome's track list. That's ALL it does.

It isn't going to cause looping if there was no looping without mods.

Frackin'Music is literally .patch files and nothing but that add tracklists to biome files, and of course, the oggs.

I can't say anything about the other music mod, but I would wager it does the same.

 

As if the issues never end, it seems that cave transitions (the point where the music stops and replaced with cave-like echo/marker point where you're unable to beam up with no background) no longer stops the music. Not that I have a problem with that, but I wonder if that has to do with that day/night transition that some are having in that link I made in my first post.

 

Any update on this matter as for the 1.3 version? Have any of the devs commented about? Is this really a "feature"?

I was really looking forward to compose some tracks and make a mod with them, but this is too discouraging...

 

I am not sure what is causing the bug for you, but I know that Frackin'Music works perfectly fine for me. You do, however, need to .patch the relevant files to tell the game where what track(s) should be played, AND this will NOT apply to any worlds generated before you added the new tracks.

If you have extremely old planets, it is likely they are just simply bugged -- visiting new planets should fix that problem. Of course, if you have a large complex structure built on an old planet, this won't help you but that's sadly how it goes.

For some weird and odd illogical reason, the tracklist is saved in the planet's data file instead of the game just going to the JSONs to see what track(s) should play on that planet. This means if you install a new music mod, already-generated planets will not have the new tracklist.

 

No, no. I don't think you understand my previous reply.

I recently started a new save, with a ridiculously simple mod replacing 3 tracks. I did it to study the game behavior before deciding how I would make the real thing (optimal track duration, if fade effects would be necessary and so on), but I noticed that something was wrong and found this thread.

You see... In this save I've visited less than 10 planets, and yet I see this problem when visiting what I'm sure that ARE unexplored planets.

So I read and understand the issue, but I want to know the reason behind the idea of saving the tracks in the world files. I mean, is this necessary? Has any dev ever recognized this as bug? I believe that if it's not necessary, this could and should be changed in the next updates. Cuz delete world files to solve such thing sounds too radical.

 

I don't know why the devs made it so that the tracklist is saved in the planets.

Although, there is a small tip for you: when you are testing your music files, rename your Player and Universe folders to something like "Player_Backup" and start the game. The game will generate 100% NEW files and you are GUARANTEED to get an unexplored planet. Then, when you're done testing, delete those Player/Universe folders and then rename the _Backups to Player and Universe to restore your old "saves".

But yeah, I don't think the tracklist being saved in the planet data is a bug, it's just an odd weird thing the devs did that just leave me scratching my head unable to find an answer. The only theory I can come up with, is that it has to do with multiplayer, they want to ensure the same track(s) play for everybody, but then again I don't really see why that would be necessary, would it be such a bad thing if Player A had a custom track while Player B uses vanilla? I don't know.

I do know that things like Frackin' Music which is nearly 700MB in filesize is unreasonable to put on a server, but yet SHOULD function fine, but won't because of this problem. Since the data is saved in the planet's data file (that the server generates and sends to the clients), the players will hear just vanilla music if FM is NOT installed on the server.

If FM -is- installed on the server, then clients who don't have FM will hear silence anytime the game chooses an FM track and a missing asset exception will occur in the client's error log because the game's looking for a file that does not exist on the client's PC.

I would like a dev to respond to this too, perhaps @metadept or somebody like that could answer the question as to why music tracklists are saved in the planet's data files rather than the game just looking up the tracklist from the JSON files. I would love to know, as it sounds like this would create far more problems than it would solve (as previously mentioned in this thread).