Orchestrion Feedback

Crafted the Eternal Wind song. The low volume killed my excitement. SIIIGH. :( Absolutely hating that I have to adjust my volume depending on the song playing, then readjust it when I leave the house !!!!!!!!!!

Similar experience with 'Solid'. Instead of the huge swell of music that greets you when you enter Ishgard, you get a whisper that seems to fade in and out even if you stand right in front of the Orchestrion and stay absolutely still.

We got an Orchestrion for our FC house a couple of days ago, up to then I'd only experienced it in other people's houses. The sound is far worse than I thought, even turning slightly on the spot will alter the volume. Also, some tracks are much louder than others, 'Another Round' seems a lot louder than 'Solid', for example.
It is such a cool feature, I really hope they introduce an option for high quality sound.

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Originally Posted by MomomiMomi

Directional audio needs to go.

Nvm, option in audio settings.

Nvm, still needs to go.

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Agreed, this option does nothing in relation to the orchestrion, have tried it.

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Originally Posted by zaviermhigo

<snip>not everyone plays this game with headphones ,

I get its a video game, but they did go for a sense of realism, I don't know about you guys , but if I play a stereo upstairs, I can't hear it as well downstairs, or in the room over. I'd like the meet the person who has a singular stereo that can fill their whole house with sound.

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So...the realism of the concept of a stereo is more important than hearing the music that is the purpose of adding the item in the first place? When I turn my back to a stereo, I'm pretty sure I can still hear the music (and yes, this is a problem with headphones whether you have sound settings on character or camera orientation.) Not everyone has the option of using their 5.1 surround sound speakers - I have them, but I'm considerate of my neighbors sharing walls with me. I see no reason they cannot just do a toggle on/off directional, wouldn't that be an easy fix?

Even a "we are currently considering this" would be nice at this point.

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Originally Posted by Bayohne

Q: Could you add an option to listen to music from the orchestrion as regular background music instead of with 3D sound?

A: We won’t be able to do this right away. Soken will be post details on the forum. The 3D sound for the sound source is working a bit too well, so we are proceeding with plans for making adjustments. We’re also developing a shuffle feature at the moment. In regards to songs from the FINAL FANTASY series, it’s difficult for us to use other titles’ songs however we like.

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Why? Why do they utterly refuse to just give us proper BGM replacement? I'll be glad to hear the improved 3D sound, and I'll certainly be glad for the Shuffle feature, but please give us the option to turn off the 3D sound entirely!

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Originally Posted by Beckett

Why? Why do they utterly refuse to just give us proper BGM replacement? I'll be glad to hear the improved 3D sound, and I'll certainly be glad for the Shuffle feature, but please give us the option to turn off the 3D sound entirely!

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I agree, an option that simply replaces the background music at the same quality and volume as we normally hear it would be very welcome. Improved 3D sound is still going to sound inferior to the default BGM, especially for people in large or medium houses.

I'm happy they are working on the 3D sound because some people really like it and find it immersive, however, it would be very nice if the rest of us were able to turn it off. More options are always a good thing.
I wonder if the reason they are so set on keeping it is because of the time and resources already invested in changing the sound from default.

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Originally Posted by Solarra

I wonder if the reason they are so set on keeping it is because of the time and resources already invested in changing the sound from default.

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As with a lot of the questionable or meh things in this game, that is likely the case... someone had to actually work to take the simple request of a BGM changing furnishing and rip the BGM part out, make it position-based, and force it to be this... "immersive feature" instead with no option.


So, look forward to the thing they mentioned before, the speaker set that will take up more item limit space, and still not give people the option.

No offense to anyone but I'm starting to wonder if most of you have medical hearing problems.

I really don't see this as a big deal. And I have about 20 songs and can hear all of them perfectly fine regardless of where in my house I am without having to adjust the volume at all.

Like, I'm all for more options, but I feel you all are over-exaggerating how bad the sound is. It's perfectly fine to me.

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Originally Posted by FoxyAreku

It's perfectly fine to me.

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Follow-up question: What kind of sound do you have? Speakers or headset? And if headset, does it have any kind of virtual surround (i.e. could you hear from which direction levi is going to dive?) or is it equal-opportunity stereo?

The issue is most noticeable through headsets. Even my "crappy" €25 phone headset (with a splitter to work with PCs) goes almost completely silent in one ear if I turn my camera 90 degrees or more in one direction instead of looking straight at the orchestrion. Especially if I'm close to it. I'd wager I wouldn't have that much of an issue with the sound if I had it on speaker sound instead, but... Since I have another person playing in the same room as me, I can't really do that.

(Also yes, I do have slight hearing issues, but they're related to my ADHD and not to actual hearing disabilities. Still means I need to have subtitles when watching stuff, since with background music and sound effects and accents I can't focus on the dialogue well enough to hear everything said.)

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Originally Posted by FoxyAreku

No offense to anyone but I'm starting to wonder if most of you have medical hearing problems.

I really don't see this as a big deal. And I have about 20 songs and can hear all of them perfectly fine regardless of where in my house I am without having to adjust the volume at all.

Like, I'm all for more options, but I feel you all are over-exaggerating how bad the sound is. It's perfectly fine to me.

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My hearing is fine. However, if you honestly think both the volume and quality of sound is exactly the same as the default background music which plays whenever the stereo is turned off.. then you're probably the one that has an issue with your hearing. Because, to me, with my normal hearing, the difference is plain as day.

We wanted to replace the background music. Period. We didn't want to replace the background music with inferior audio.

my biggest problem currently with orchestrion is obtaining the CT scrolls :(

long queues, low drop rate, cant go unsynced, roll vs 7 other players if it even drops. and you need 9 of them to complete your collection.

very sad :(

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Originally Posted by Empty-handed

my biggest problem currently with orchestrion is obtaining the CT scrolls :(

long queues, low drop rate, cant go unsynced, roll vs 7 other players if it even drops. and you need 9 of them to complete your collection.

very sad :(

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Edit: I'm wrong!
They actually fixed that with this patch. Now the rolls are a 100% guaranteed drop, and each party gets one. If you can go in with an 8 man pre-made, you'll get the roll in one go, if the rest are willing to pass, in 8 gos if everyone wants one.

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Originally Posted by Beckett

They actually fixed that with this patch. Now the rolls are a 100% guaranteed drop, and each party gets one. If you can go in with an 8 man pre-made, you'll get the roll in one go, if the rest are willing to pass, in 8 gos if everyone wants one.

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i dont think they did, i just queued CT and got 0 song to drop. :(

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Originally Posted by Empty-handed

i dont think they did, i just queued CT and got 0 song to drop. :(

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You mean you had to leave empty-handed? ;_;

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Originally Posted by Empty-handed

i dont think they did, i just queued CT and got 0 song to drop. :(

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Yep, I was totally wrong. They're going to make them 100%, but they haven't yet.

Yeah... I thought the drops will be 100% this patch as well. At least the queue will be much better now thanks to relic hype. Make sure to board the relic train if you still need those tower orchestrion roll!

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Originally Posted by Solarra

I wonder if the reason they are so set on keeping it is because of the time and resources already invested in changing the sound from default.

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Pretty much this I guess... I do think it's a good gesture on their part to just suck it up and give us ambient sound mode while they are fixing the virtual surround mode.

Also, I'm still waiting for Soken's post regarding said topic.

Greetings,

I would like to share a comment from sound director Soken regarding the orchestrion.

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Hey, everyone!

Sound Director Masayoshi Soken here.

I would like to thank you all for the valuable feedback you have sent to us in regard to the orchestrion.

Allow me to dive right in and explain details about the orchestrion. Unlike the typical background music you hear in-game, the orchestrion utilizes a totally different system to play audio. In order to raise the quality of the music that the orchestrion plays to be at the same level of quality as you would normally hear, we will need to make some drastic improvements to the current sound driver and the data itself. I apologize that this is taking some time to accomplish; however, we're currently working towards making further improvements so please hang in there a bit longer!

Additionally, we received comments stating the the directional audio effect was too pronounced. We should be able to make adjustments on individual songs to fix this, so we're currently working on these in order. But! There is a large amount of data, so we may or may not make it by the next patch... No! We'll make it in time!! We'll do our best to get it done!!!

For those interested in the background story that explains the more technical aspects of how the current iteration of the orchestrion was created, I've prepared a detailed explanation that you can read below.

FFXIV's sound is played on top of a very complicated sound system. In order to implement the orchestrion, we could not play the audio in the same manner as the normal background music due to size restrictions within the system. This meant that we had to decide between not implementing the orchestrion at all or take out various aspects of the system in order to get it into the game. This time we chose the latter option. The reason that the sounds is played using 3D direction audio isn't because we wanted to implement it that way, but because of that fact that it was the best solution available when considering methods to improve the audio quality within the system restrictions.

In other words, one of the things we had to drop in order to implement the orchestrion was the feature which everyone has suggested - the ability to listen to the music in the same quality throughout the house instead of the 3D directional audio.

Let me explain a bit more about why we had to make this call.

There are many different songs in the game, and in order to have the music change instantly, and to be listened by many players at once, we were required to lower the amount of data for each song in the orchestrion. To be more specific, we needed to make the data smaller, approximately 1/50th of a CD quality song in order to implement this. To better explain this as musical data by converting this to measures, say we wanted to play a 5 minute song, but we only have room for 6 seconds but we still needed to make it work.

There are three major ways to lower the sound data:

1. Use a high compression codec
2. Reduce the sampling rate or bit rate
3. Remove the channels

For the first method, this is already implemented in every bit of sound data since the release of FFXIV, so we implemented the second and third option as well. Lower the quality of the audio to the lowest quality, and dropping the channels from being stereo to mono. Honestly, as a sound director, I feel bad that we have to deliver the background music in this quality, and I was thinking of methods to somehow make improvements when implementing it. And this is where we decided to go with the 3D directional audio heard from a furnishing to try and eliminate the audio quality as much as possible. From a data standpoint, this was the only available method to implement, so we made improvements on how the audio is played to get this implemented.

And this is why the system utilizes a feature where the audio is played through a furnishing. We decided that if it's setup in a way that the audio is coming out of a furnishing, even if the quality of the audio is the lowest, and also being played in mono, we can somehow bring it the the level where we can play the songs, and this is how we were able to prepare 47 tracks for release. This is what went on behind the scenes for implementing the orchestrion.

Details on the drastic improvements for the sound driver and data which I mentioned at the start is much more complicated, so I would like to write this up at another time!

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Thank you for the extensive reply, Zhexos ^^ (And thank you to Soken for providing all that information ^^)
It's always good to know when things are under consideration or being worked on, even if the solution isn't necessarily in sight yet. It's a lot better than just silence, where we're left wondering if we're being ignored completely ^^;

This is less of an orchestration comment and more of a comment on updates to the sound driver. I'm curious if Soken is interested in experimenting with the OSSIC X and if that kind of audio is possible to support.

I really like it when the devs take the time to explain the technical limitations and go into detail about what they did to overcome it, or why it might not be working to standard right now. Thanks for the explanation of it.

I am not a fan of how if you are facing a certain way the music lessens in sound. Maybe it's suppose to have a surround sound feel, I don't know. I only hear well out of my right ear so I notice when the sound is distinctively lowered and that happens with the Orchestrion while indoors. I don't like this at all.

I should be able to hear full audio like BGM just like I do on any map instead of having my sound quality dropped just because my character is facing a certain way. I hope this gets fixed.

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Originally Posted by Zhexos

Greetings,

I would like to share a comment from sound director Soken regarding the orchestrion.

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I appreciate the time spent on the explanation, and I'm glad to hear this was about performance rather than being an intentional "artsy" decision (i.e. giving the players an authentic radio quality experience).

But even with that explanation.. I guess I'm just not understanding why a very specific song can be played as background music for a zone, but any other piece of music can not be played as background music in its place instead. Music A in Zone-X is fine, but Music B through Z can't be done?

Because that essentially seems to be what is being said here. You can play the "housing theme" (whatever it's called) inside a house (which is just a very small zone, correct?), but you can't play any other theme in that house instead, at least not without jumping through all these crazy hoops for performance reasons. I mean, we can listen to the various mount themes, FATE themes, battle themes, or holiday event themes immediately replace and become the background music in almost any zone, but not the house because.. why exactly? What am I not getting here?

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Originally Posted by Gyson

You can play the "housing theme" (whatever it's called) inside a house (which is just a very small zone, correct?), but you can't play any other theme in that house instead, at least not without jumping through all these crazy hoops for performance reasons. I mean, we can listen to the various mount themes, FATE themes, battle themes, or holiday event themes immediately replace and become the background music in almost any zone, but not the house because.. why exactly? What am I not getting here?

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Probably because when they built the system, they built it with the mount music, battle music and fate music (as well as holiday music) replacements in mind, but the orchestrion was a later addition, and there was no "room" in the coding to replace music in areas where none of those systems (mount, battle, fate) were allowed. There was no room to create a new "layer" for the music, so to speak, not without breaking other bits of code and needing to recode more or less the entire engine. At least that's how I read the explanation.

On the surface, it seems like an easy switch, but having fiddled a little with the coding of various RPG maker engines, I know that things that seem easy aren't always easy ^^; Especially when you want to introduce new functions.

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Originally Posted by Noxifer

Probably because when they built the system, they built it with the mount music, battle music and fate music (as well as holiday music) replacements in mind, but the orchestrion was a later addition, and there was no "room" in the coding to replace music in areas where none of those systems (mount, battle, fate) were allowed. There was no room to create a new "layer" for the music, so to speak, not without breaking other bits of code and needing to recode more or less the entire engine. At least that's how I read the explanation..

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"..no room in the coding to replace music.." ? Please don't be offended by this, but at the risk of being blunt, I've worked as video-game developer for more years than I care to admit and your statement above makes no logical sense.

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Originally Posted by Gyson

I mean, we can listen to the various mount themes, FATE themes, battle themes, or holiday event themes immediately replace and become the background music in almost any zone, but not the house because.. why exactly? What am I not getting here?

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I might be wrong, but here's what it sounds like to me:

For quick playback, all audio is loaded into memory by the time you enter the map (which is what the loading screen is for). So, if you want immediate playback on the orchestration, all 47 soundtracks need to be in memory by the time the player enters the house, otherwise some waiting time will be incurred (though, probably not much) every time the player samples a new track.

From what Soken said, it looks like there isn't enough memory left (with all the other assets, especially on the PS3) to store all 47 uncompressed tracks, with quality as high as what we are used to. Hence, the sound engineering team had to compromise on quality in order to have all the tracks fit into memory.

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Originally Posted by Tuufless

I might be wrong, but here's what it sounds like to me:

For quick playback, all audio is loaded into memory by the time you enter the map (which is what the loading screen is for). So, if you want immediate playback on the orchestration, all 47 soundtracks need to be in memory by the time the player enters the house, otherwise some waiting time will be incurred (though, probably not much) every time the player samples a new track.

From what Soken said, it looks like there isn't enough memory left (with all the other assets, especially on the PS3) to store all 47 uncompressed tracks, with quality as high as what we are used to. Hence, the sound engineering team had to compromise on quality in order to have all the tracks fit into memory.

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I assumed something similar. But when you consider the level of design and activity happening in any given outdoor zone versus whatever happens to be going on in your humble home or inn room.. I am really struggling to understand the memory issue. At the very least the system should be more dynamic, as some of these music themes are quite short and have a smaller footprint than others (or some (smaller) houses simply have less going on inside of them than other larger ones do). And are the developers just unwilling to provide better audio quality for players that have more memory available on their systems?

I also understand that the goal is to get these songs to begin playing quickly, hence lowering the quality. Two things with that: 1) I'm quite curious to know how long it takes to swap in a new piece of music when it's kept at its default quality. 2) I'm not convinced that (given the choice between a small pause in the music to hear a song at its default quality versus destroying the audio quality for faster loading times) players would choose speed over quality. At least let it be a player controlled slider option (e.g. "Quality < ==== > Speed" ). Players who can't stand to hear a few seconds of silence whenever they switch music tracks can opt for the faster loading, lower quality music instead.

Having said that, that the quality of the audio is being reduced is only part of the problem. A lot of these songs are simply too darn quiet (and not just because the quality has been thrown out the window), a problem they don't seem to suffer from when being played as background music. I shouldn't have to adjust my sound settings every time I switch songs. And, of course, the directional aspect (which he went into).

This screams PS3 limitation.

By my calculations (assuming we're sticking with the OGG format used in game), with 47 Orchestrion rolls out there, to load every one into memory on entering the house/inn/zone, you're looking at about 235MB, which is basically nothing by PC/PS4 standards... however, the PS3 has 256MB of system ram...

... I know they wanted to have "each track load quickly" (on PS3), but the best experience for everyone would be have the previews (10~ish seconds of each scroll) load in at reduced quality, and then when you chose the track you (PS3 users) might have to wait 5-10 more seconds for it to play at normal BGM quality (PC/PS4 users would likely be instant, this whole "issue" is most likely about platform parity).

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Originally Posted by Gyson

I assumed something similar. But when you consider the level of design and activity happening in any given outdoor zone versus whatever happens to be going on in your humble home or inn room.. I am really struggling to understand the memory issue. At the very least the system should be more dynamic, as some of these music themes are quite short and have a smaller footprint than others (or some (smaller) houses simply have less going on inside of them than other larger ones do). And are the developers just unwilling to provide better audio quality for players that have more memory available on their systems?

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Looking at some BGM soundbanks I'm working with at the moment, a single track would take up about 50-60MB (uncompressed), so 47 of these would be about 2GB, well beyond the PS3's 256MB of system RAM. :)

Edit: I just noticed SavingPrincess made a much more realistic size estimate of 235MB, but the point still stands- you're not fitting textures, model data, etc, in 21MB. :)

Of course, compression would reduce its footprint by a sizeable amount, but to fit all that plus other assets would require one heckuva compression algorithm.

Another (likely) thing is that way back when v2.0 was in preproduction and memory budgets were being planned out, they probably didn't anticipate needing that large an audio budget. Fast forward to today, you're not changing budget allocations, so that's what Soken has to work with.

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Originally Posted by Gyson

"..no room in the coding to replace music.." ? Please don't be offended by this, but at the risk of being blunt, I've worked as video-game developer for more years than I care to admit and your statement above makes no logical sense.

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Originally Posted by Tuufless

From what Soken said, it looks like there isn't enough memory left

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Yeah, sorry for clumsy phrasing, but that's pretty much what I meant ^^;
(Not to mention that sometimes you find you've programmed yourself into a corner, and that to change one bit of coding you realize you'll have to change all the bits of coding referencing to that particular bit of coding, and it turns into a much bigger project than you wanted/expected.)

I appreciate Director Soken taking the time to give us an explanation.
I wonder too, if part of the problem is that the sound is altered for everyone in the room/house. With mounts for example, only you get to hear the music.

Of course, all we can do is speculate. I think it says something about the quality of the game in general that we all assumed this was an artistic choice and not a compromise on quality due to limitations.
If the sound could be improved at the cost of making us wait a little between changing tracks, I'd be happy with that. However, I appreciate it might not be that simple.
Nice to know this is being worked on.

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Originally Posted by Zhexos

Greetings,

I would like to share a comment from sound director Soken regarding the orchestrion.

"we could not play the audio in the same manner as the normal background music due to size restrictions within the system"

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Could you clarify? A song is about 5MB and is already stored locally in the client files. Should that not take up only 5MB RAM just to swap it into memory?

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Originally Posted by Zhexos

Greetings,

I would like to share a comment from sound director Soken regarding the orchestrion.

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My reply to Soken's explanation:

Instead why don't we stop developing this wonderful game for such an antiquated system? I'm looking at you, PS3. The time has come. Let's call end of support for that boat anchor that is weighing down the yacht that is FFXIV!

The following additions and adjustments have been made to the orchestrion:

The volume, directional quality, and auditory range of orchestion rolls has been adjusted.
New orchestion rolls have been added.

Thank you for the change! Also:

The Leader of the Band III Add 50 unique music rolls to your orchestrion.

Goodbye life, time to bitch about RNG.

I just wanted to say a big "thank you" for the improvements to the orchestrion in this latest patch. Some of the orchestrion songs are a little quiet compared to others (I have this complaint about some of the mount songs as well, like the black and gold magitek mounts which I struggle to hear while moving compared to other mount music), but overall things are sounding a whole lot better now. :)

Yes, thank you very much. It's a huge improvement.