Can't get MP3 Player working properly

Okay, seems this dropped off radar with no responses. Anyone care to take another look and give me some suggestions?

~SDC~

Probably it didn't save the entire path information. When we were testing with winamp, we had to save the m3u files directly from winamp to the playlist directory to make it save the path information. We were using winamp2, though, so I don't know if anything has changed since then.

Okay, I finally got it. Thank you, Cari, that was the vital bit of information that I needed to figure it out. You're right, apparently. You can't just create the playlist one place and move it. You actually have to load the playlist up into winamp and then directly save it into GalCiv's Playlists directory. Also, I discovered that if you tell GalCiv's MP3 player to look in the directory where you keep your music, it seems it will *only* play the playlist it creates, called "Default" which consists of every MP3 in that directory....I'm not really sure how it orders them. I sort of had that figured a bit last night, but today I was able to make that work for me. I loaded this Default playlist into Winamp then I saved it (under a new name...I called it "Everything") directly into GalCiv's playlists directory and it showed up as a choice as well.

But yes, it is confirmed that you can't simply move the .m3u file from the directory you saved it in originally to the GalCiv playlists directory and expect it to work. Nor can you have GalCiv use .m3u files that are saved anywhere but in GalCiv's own Playlists directory, apparently. Also, another note....I think you have to actually load the playlist up into Winamp from the .m3u file that you *originally* created and then use that to save it again in GalCiv\Playlists. I discovered this a minute ago when I was trying to load the lists into Winamp from a Playlist (note the difference) directory inside GalCiv that I had mistakenly created and saved them in last night. But when I loaded *those* .m3u files into Winamp and then resaved them into the Playlists (again, note the plural...it's important) directory....when I tried to play them in the game, it didn't actually play any of the tracks but instead just scrolled through the various track titles at high speed. Not sure what was up with that, though I experienced the same thing last night when I was trying to get GalCiv to play these playlists from my C:\Music directory.

Something else I did, just in case it helped, was to make sure I played at least the first song in a playlist, after loading it into Winamp, but before saving it into GalCiv\Playlists. Just throwing that out in case it was significant.

Anyway, thanks for your help, but you might want to work on seeing if you can iron some of the bugs out of this integrated MP3 player or at least give some kind of documentation on *exactly* what to do to make it work as it's quite confusing to a number of people, I'm sure.....at least I hope I'm not alone.

~SDC~

Yea I am still having problems. I used Winamp 3 to make a m3u playlist I saved it in my music folder, I opened it up and resaved it in my Playlist folder within the Galciv directory. Now when I load the playlist it doesn't play but on the game screen it cycles through them quickly over and over again, but no music is played. i thought i followed these directions. Some help is needed please.

You opened up the playlist in Winamp, from your music folder where you first saved it, right?

Here's what I did, exactly:

1) Had created 4 playlists, in Winamp, the night before and saved them in my Music folder.
2) Opened up Winamp
3) Chose Load List
4) Opened up "Alternative Mix" from Music folder.
5) Clicked on Play and let it play a few seconds of the first song (I don't know if this is necessary, but I thought this might more "firmly" create the playlist than if I just loaded it up...this way I knew Winamp could find and play the songs, at least).
6) Clicked on Stop to stop music playing.
7) Clicked on Save List.
8) Saved list in Galactic Civilizations\Playlists (make sure it is Playlists in the plural....when I created a Playlist directory in GalCiv with no "s" on the end, these playlists wouldn't work from it).
9) Repeated with my other 3 Playlists.
10) Start up a game of GalCiv (in my case loading a saved game).
11) Go to options and turn on "Use Player Created Playlist" (Or whatever it says)
12) By default, it will have "Playlists" selected as the directory to use. In my case, when I finally got this to work through these specific steps, when I opened up this option, my 4 playlists were already there. Double-clicking on them or clicking once and clicking load started them playing.

Before I did this, I'd tried many variations of this and nothing else had worked. I *think* that I got the problem where it cycles through your song names really fast w/o playing anything when I tried to use Playlists that I either opened from somewhere that was not their original source (ie, I opened the Playlist in Winamp from my accidentally created Galactic Civilizations\Playlist and then tried saving from that. To fix it, I apparently had to open them from my Music folder where I'd first saved them and then resave them in Playlists...the right one) or when I tried to take an existing Playlist and simply copy the .m3u file into another directory.

I hope this helps....who knows, maybe it was clicking on Play in Winamp that finally cinched it for me and made it work.

Again, I feel I should point out that this is extremely unintuitive and easy to mess up. Is there any chance of getting some documentation posted on the web or through SDC to instruct Bonus Pack users on how to properly set up the MP3 player to work? I don't see how I possibly would have figured all of this out without the help of various posters and especially CariElf's final bit of info that did it for me.

Surely, me and I_Intrude aren't the only ones having trouble figuring this out are we?

That said, I LOVE the feature....it's wonderful. I just think it needs to be made clear what you actually have to do to set it up.

Nope I tried all advice but it still doesn't work for me. Nothing but silence and I noticed that GalCivs CPU usage shot up to 100% when I tried loading one of the playlists. I really hope that there will be something official said on this, instructions or something to tell me what is wrong.

No doubt, I need documentation too. Tell me what to do and type. like if i saved my playlist to the PlayLists directory in the galciv directory do I simply type "PlayLists" and then hit the set button or do I type "c:\program files\strategy first\galactic civilizations\playlists"

~SDC~

I dropped my Musicmatch playlists right into the root of my d-drive. Made for a really short path and everthing worked perfectly.

~SDC~

Ancient Warrior:

For me, when I clicked on the Load Playlist button, it had the word "Playlists" entered into the path box by default. When I finally got my .m3u files saved directly from Winamp into that directory, they were just there when I clicked on Load Playlist the next time.

I never tried using Musicmatch, as I don't have it, but I know GalCiv wouldn't recognize the playlists I'd first made in Windows Media Player. That's when I took someone's advice and specifically used Winamp to recreate the playlists from scratch and save them (Windows Media Player creats something like .wpl files instead of .w3u)

I'm not sure why it worked for me but not for I_Intrude or Ancient Warrior nor why Musicmatch works fine for Slapbone and even in a different path.

Honestly, I'm really not sure why it should have to have the playlists saved by a specific MP3 player to work unless the integrated player in GalCiv is only set up to look for specific file types and .wpl isn't one of them....I guess that could very likely be the reason, but it seems like Windows Media Player should've been supported as obviously more people are likely to have that than Winamp.

You know....something else you guys that are having problems getting your MP3s to play might want to try....

Check and make sure your MP3s are still *there* on your hard drive. I discovered last night, when I was trying to get this to work, that that bad build of Stardock Central that I updated to on Monday night had wiped out all my MP3s, MPGs, AVIs, and a couple other directories as well. Luckily I had a backup of most of my MP3s on another computer, though I did lose some stuff.

Anyway, it's possible (if you haven't verified them...and if you're creating new playlists it's obviously highly unlikely) that GalCiv can't play your MP3s because they're not there any more.

The mp3 player in Gal Civ can only handle mp3s at the moment.

We chose the m3u format because it had the simplest format, and both winamp and musicmatch are popular players. I think that you can also save Real One playlists as m3u files.

You could, if you had to, just create a text file of path names and save it as a m3u file, because that's all that Gal Civ looks for; it ignores the extended mp3 information. That's what Gal Civ does when you put the mp3 files directly into the playlist directory.

I'll look into adding wmp list compatibility when I have the time.

That's cool, Cari....it occurred to me at the end of my post that it was quite likely you had to program GalCiv's MP3 player to recognize specific file types...makes sense after I thought about it.

And obviously people are having more serious and immediate issues than this, so I'm sure adding Windows Media Player compatibility shouldn't be a high priority.

Nevertheless....documentation on how to work with GalCiv's MP3 player should definitely be looked into.

Thanks again for all your help....hopefully the rest of these guys can get theirs working somehow.