Orchestrion Suggestion

One of the biggest reasons that I have been able to play this game since the Beta is the music. The score from this game is just absolutely fantastic. Every time i took a break from the game, I would later listen to some of the pieces from the game and then find myself resubscribing days or even hours later. With that said, the addition of the orchestrion system into POH was a super exciting feature for me. However, there has always been one thing about it that has been lacking for me; the ability to use the orchestrion rolls obtained while doing stuff in the overworld outside of player owned housing (essentially have a portable orchestrion or boombox). A good example of what I mean is the music player in the game "Runescape". In that game you have a music player that either allows you to auto play the BGM (the area you're in will play the music for that area as you enter it) or manual (you can select any of the unlocked BGM and listen to it anywhere in the game). I think something like this would be absolutely amazing for FF14. It would bring significantly more value to orchestrion system as a whole, and allow for players like myself to listen to various in game music whenever an urge to listen to a specific BGM comes up. The only areas that I could see wanting to restrict the usage of this system would be any instanced area (dungeon, raid, trial, etc.) or inside of a player owned home (this would devalue the player's own orchestrion since a lot of housing enthusiasts select music that either represent their own likes or set the mood for their home). This feature would make doing any overworld content significantly better for me, and I'd like to hope I'm not alone in that mentality.

memory limitations. you would have to make all music available to every player character and it would have to load in that data everywhere you go.

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Originally Posted by DrWho2010

memory limitations. you would have to make all music available to every player character and it would have to load in that data everywhere you go.

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This is very true... but... what if you could take, like, 2 or 3 scrolls from your Orchestrion and put them in a little portable player?

It's not how much music you load but the fact even one track has to be loaded that is the problem - the way music is coded in the game is it appears that there are two seperate music 'channels' loaded by the game client at any one time (one channel for normal zone BGM and a second channel for special themes like mount music or battle themes), and depending on where you are, these channels can change tracks or mute at certain times or if you move to a certain spot in a zone or at a certain time of day, which is all controlled by the server.

Adding a portable orchestrion over that which could be accessed anywhere would just create programming headaches for Soken and his sound team, particularly if this second channel is what the Orchestrion uses, which is likely given it would not normally need to be used for mount or battle themes when played inside an Inn room or personal house).

So as much as I would love to have a portable orchestrion, it just isn't possible from a technical standpoint due to how the game's music is programmed I'm sorry to say.

That's sad information, but thanks for the thorough response Enkidoh.