In 2008, Nine Inch Nails released their album “Ghosts I-IV” under a “Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial Share Alike license.”
Since I’m going to be using a small handful of tracks in my forthcoming module, “Wraith: The Grym Requiem,” I thought I should just post the entire album as a hak. I’ve also included the pdf of liner notes that came with the original release.
Note that this only works in EE, as it puts the music in a hak rather than the music directory. Also, these are just renamed mp3 files with no header as was required under 1.69.
https://neverwintervault.org/project/nwnee/audio/music/ghosts-nine-inch-nails
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Interesting. I wasn’t aware the .bmus could work from a hak point of origin. Is there an inherent advantage performance/game-wise to having the bmus in a hak versus floating in the music folder? And I’m thinking both from a player perspective and a PW server perspective.
From my perspective, I like the fact that it doesn’t clutter my music folder. If I decide to delete a module, I can easily get rid of its haks. Whereas with music, usually it is difficult to tell which music is associated with a given module.
On the other hand, it’s one more hak to count against the limit of . . . 50 haks, I think? I’m not sure what the limit with EE is now because I think it was increased.
From a performance or game perspective, I have absolutely no idea and would love to hear from others.
Hakpacks hand a few big benefits. Tidiness is the best selling point no longer do files except maybe tlk (which I need to test!) need to be loose. Big boon for players and makers.
It is slightly more optimal disk usage (although music files tend to be above 1kb anyway) and also allows proper nwsync generation.
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Ah, the Sync generation is a fairly signifcant advantage. I hadn’t considered that. I was more curious about the playback itself… whether it’s more or less responsive from the music folder vs a hak, and anything along those lines of thought.
As for the tidiness, that @Grymlorde mentioned, that is important but not a deal-breaker in my book. But EE can handle way more than 50 haks. World of Greyhawk uses 80 or so.
So, if all things being equal, both performance and audio quality-wise, it seems going forward for builders is to house your .bmus in a hak.
Thanks, gentlemen.
I should also add, that these bmus (which are just renamed mp3s) are 320kb rather than 128. EE plays the 320 just fine, but what I don’t know is whether the output is 128 or 320. I haven’t tested it to find out.
One thought on performance, if a particular PC has a ton of RAM but a slow disk (like my laptop), then loading all the music into RAM should help. But this is really an edge case.
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Cool, it’s a great album. I’ll definitely check out the module.