PyMedia claims to support this, though it mentions you may need to "play" the file for a second or two to initialize decoding and get the full length. --Noah Dave LeCompte (really) wrote: >> "Ian Mallett" <geometrian@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On 7/14/07, Dave LeCompte (really) <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > >>> That works for OGG and WAV sounds, but does not work for other music >>> files, like MP3, MOD, and MIDI, right? >> Oh, opps. You're probably right. I'm curious now, why don't you know the >> length of the file? > > Conceivably, you might want to intelligently deal with music provided by > the user. For example: > > - some games, including "The Sims", allow players to put their own music > into a certain directory, and the game will take advantage of the music. > > - some games, including "Monster Rancher", use user-provided music as an > integral part of gameplay. With "Monster Rancher", players inserted a CD, > which seeded the procedural content routines for making monsters. > > > I was thinking more about some crude ways to get approximate answers, and > I was thinking that the file size on disk might be a guide to the duration > of the song. For MP3, I think typical compression ratios (vs a 44kHz 16 > bit stereo WAV file) is something like 11:1, so you can do the math (or, > better yet, just look at a collection of known MP3s and figure out an > average multipler) to convert from bytes to seconds. > > However, this doesn't work for MIDI or MOD music - for MIDI, a song with > four instruments playing in harmony might use four times the space as a > solo for the same length of time. MOD music is even less predictable, as > the sound patches are a large part of the file size, and there's little > knowing how many times any patch might be used. > > > That said, I think that specific modules for the various file types exist > that could be used to determine the duration of MP3 and MIDI, and maybe > even MOD. > > -Dave LeCompte >
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