Perhaps a portable orchestrion player?

[H3K83]

Okay, so, follow me...

How I'd imagine that this feature would work is similarly to the Aether Compass — it would be a reusable key item that would bring up an accordingly stylized version of the orchestrion prompt which would allow players to create, loop, and shuffle playlists as well as enable/disable their music. I could perhaps see it being expanded to selecting certain playlists for certain areas, but I think just being able to set a playlist up and listen to that would be good enough and would put to effective use the orchestrion music outside of the inns and personal housing. However, I think there should also be a caveat to that to allow the default background music to get some time in the spotlight as well, which would perhaps be some sort of limitation based on MSQ completion or something similar. That way the players are allowed to play what music they want to play in any given area while the developers, musicians, sound engineers, etc. are afforded the recognition they rightfully deserve for their hard work.

I have a small concept of how it might look/function in game too below:

Tomestone of Melody

Tomestones of Melody are portable entertainment devices once used by denizens of the Allagan Empire in their day-to-day activities and, while the means with which to listen to these devices have been lost, modern magitek alternatives have made it possible in the present day. By filtering the sound directly into a personal linkpearl, one can listen to a variety of music aggregated from their orchestrion playlist that will entrance with such symphonic sound as to drown out any other sources of melody one might come across. It begs the question: Who needs a bard when one has a Tomestone of Melody with which to get coins tossed to them aplenty?

※When the Tomestone of Melody is enabled, it will overwrite the background music of the current area with the chosen selection of music and will remain in effect upon warping to other areas until it is disabled. The Tomestone of Melody will be disabled temporarily in areas where the conditions for utilizing this item have not been met.

[Enkidoh]

Unfortunately, despite this being a very popular request from players I do not believe it can be implemented (SE are well aware of such a request, but I seem to recall Yoshi stating why such an addition cannot be done, but I have no citation for that).

As I understand it how the client plays music is it has two seperate channels set aside for BGM: a primary music channel for background music (that can often vary depending on the time of day or where you are in a zone), and a secondary channel for 'event' themes (such as battle music). When a secondary theme needs to play, it mutes but does not stop the primary channel, while cueing up the secondary, keeping the secondary channel cued but also muted when switching back to the primary. It appears the Orchestrion normally uses this secondary channel by default, thus muting the normal background music without actually replacing it (and cancelling it completely when the room with the Orchestrion is left).

Thus the problem with providing a portable Orchestrion; it would cause conflicts in the client with normal battle music and event themes that are required to play at a moment's notice (battle music isn't usually required to be played inside an Inn Room or private dwelling naturally so this wasn't considered a problem when the Orchestrion was first added to the game).

Thus due to the huge amount of recoding and changes under the hood required to implement such a portable Orchestrion, I sadly don't see SE adding such a player to the game alas (don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a portable Orchestrion, but I also understand why that cannot be unfortunately). May I be proven wrong though (and I want to be in this case)!

[Stepjam]

I definitely believe that it's a limited audio channel issue. There have been so many times where I've leveled up, but the level up theme gets cut off by another sound effect and just stops