Ever want to get more out of your music? Feel like your relation
ship is entirely one sided? Then you probably have not played Audiosurf yet. In a nutshell this program turns you music into a game that you play for points and against other people if you so wish. There are quite a number of cool features in Audiosurf but they are easily discovered while playing or researching the game. Instead I wish to make this post about a problem Audiosurf has, which is that tracks can be inconsistent across operating systems.
If you have ever seriously tried to play Audiosurf with someone or maybe a group of people you might discover that another person’s track is different then yours, in both congestion and block positioning. It so happens that me and my friends have setup a mini competition where we get scored for points and positions in several weekly songs. For full details: http://surfoff.blogspot.com/
Back to the main purpose of this article, yes, tracks do differ between operating systems, most common are windows xp to windows vista. The problem seems to be with the mp3 decoders, or so they say.
Here is how to fix this problem, simply use an open source audio editor like audacity and export the mp3 as a wav file. Then distribute and surf the wav file. You might want to use a good compressor, like winrar, for the file however, as it will be big.
Why does this work?
Audiosurf must first decode an mp3 before it can process it for block positions and colors. This process can differ between operating systems as previously discussed. So what we do here is decode the mp3 once on one machine and distribute the song uncompressed. This way Audiosurf does not need to decode anything, which in turn means it is not operating system sensitive.
Happy surfing
