Portable Orchestrion

[Canadane]

Wouldn’t the easier solution be to load up your ffxiv playlist of mp3s?
PCs and PS4s can both do this.

[Genz]

I dont dislike the idea, but the musics of the orchestrion are compressed to very low quality so it would be (another) waste of dev time when players can just use winamp or something to listen to the normal quality.

[DracotheDragon]

it might have something to do with the way music is coded for this game since 1.0 that makes a portable (even client side) orchestrion not possible, but i do hope in the future, when they do have to fix the code that it can be possible, but i think that would be a long while off yet.

[Freyt]

Considering FF15 pulled it off, I can't see how it isn't possible for FF14.

Though I don't think there's an ever present need for it, either.

[WellFooled]

It would be cool if a portable Orchestrion allowed us to customize individual instances of music too. Like for normal battles play this song, for FATE combat play this other song, for mounts play this song, background music during the day this here song, during the night this other song, etc and not just be a basic music player.

[Lambdafish]

"We don't have the tech" always seemed like a fishy answer to this. We know they can change the music individually, they do it all the time with mounts. I'm sure there's some reason they can't or don't want to do this, but "the system can't handle it" is probably not accurate.

Its always been fishy to me too. The technology already exists, surely the code looks something vaguely like.

var zoneBGM
var mountBGM

if (mountWithBGM = true)
BGM = mountBGM
else
BGM = zoneBGM

Why can't mountBGM be replaced by MP3Choice?

Considering FF15 pulled it off, I can't see how it isn't possible for FF14.

Actual excuse aside, this isn't a reasonable response. They are two completely different games, with two completely different code bases.

[Kurando]

I think it's just coded in a way that is either you have music turned on and it's specifically set or you can turn it off, there is no in between with it. Let's say a portable orchestrion was an option, imagine loading in to an area with hundreds of players each one listening to something different, now that could cause unnecessary loading issues and who knows if the server deserves to actually handle it to begin with (other things are a priority I'd say). As mentioned, it's probably much easier to just have a playlist in the background through a media player instead.

[Lambdafish]

I think it's just coded in a way that is either you have music turned on and it's specifically set or you can turn it off, there is no in between with it. Let's say a portable orchestrion was an option, imagine loading in to an area with hundreds of players each one listening to something different, now that could cause unnecessary loading issues and who knows if the server deserves to actually handle it to begin with.

If there are 10 players, each on primal mounts, thats 10 different BGMs going on at once. That is client-side information so shouldn't affect loading times.

[Transient_Shadow]

Please tell me I'm not the only one who thought of this when seeing the title.

[Kurando]

If there are 10 players, each on primal mounts, thats 10 different BGMs going on at once. That is client-side information so shouldn't affect loading times.

Those are fixed BGMs though linked to the mounts, a portable orchestrion would have multiple pieces of music which would vary greatly amongst what each player has in their playlist, that's potentially a lot of information to handle regardless of it being client side or not. There is a reason the current orchestrion is limited to certain areas.