Constructive Critism on Direct Song & Guild Wars

I want to start out how I love the GW DS music, and the great idea of the relationship between the two companies.

I just want to bring this to Anet attention, especially since I bought Gwen and LOVE the music.

I do know the dual company means Anet is only responsible for some things and DirectSong for other. And I know that one company may not be able to decide policies of the other.

• Gwen does not yet update the GuildWars.ds... so ppl who buy early will have to manually update at an latter date and probable won't realize this. Any plans on having Anet distrubte this file / update as part of the normal GW or planned GW2 update process?
• When they went from 128kb to 320kb they went from no expire date to an expire date (way in the future).
• Sorrow's Furance is still in 128kb sample rate.
• The installers are NOT vista compliant in any sense (except the old Sorrow's Furnance which is using the OLD installer... that works with vista if you run as admin).
• The *new* music for Gwen intro was not playing when login screen changed until latter... and I pretty sure I can guess why... you had to create a new music trigger code to bypass the DS GuildWars.ds playlist entry so DS users could hear it.

Anyone who gets the Gwen DS pack now... will have to manually fix or re-download an DS pack once this is fixed unless Anet pushes this file as part of a GW update.

I can see people who get the pack now, and won't realize or know how to *fix/relaize* DS not playing in Gwen. I can see NCSoft support bouncing users to the DS support.

I suspect there still some users that have the *same track plays over and over again in towns* because they never re-downloaded or manually fixed the GuildWars.ds with a newer version.

There is tightening the DRM restrictions. As it was still fairly locked down but adding an expire date to music that did not have it before (128 -> 320kb upgrade)... I fear this will drive more people away.

Anyone who knows how to break WMA is not affected by this, the method it 1st launched in do "keep the honest people honest" as it was.

Sorrow's Furance - This is the only pack to never get updated to the much better sounding 328kb sound rate.

As stated by Gale and others, GW is moving to be Vista Compliant with Microsoft... yet DirectSong you have to have detailed instructions / work around to get things to work.

Gale/Alex/Andrew, Dev that read these forums, please take this in consideration as you work on GW 2 and any final updates with GW. I do know that it may be more complicated due to it being a thing between two companies, but the end product the users is seeing is what they all see. I think the addition of DS & GW make for a very memorial experience. The music helps add great value to your beautiful visual game. I love the music so much I bought a copy of the SE version of guild wars (already owned the CE version) just to get the other 4 exclusive tracks that game with the SE. GW is a tightly well made game... but DS & GW this feels a bit of sloppiness of DS or a moving away from it.

I do have a request for responses, if you can please leave the DRM sucks out of it. I agree DRM should be removed, but that's not going to happen, I accept that and just wish the DRM was more fair.



(Edit) It appears they changed Gwen OST, or I could of been in error. Either way, it does have Burning rights now.

I have an entirely different set of DS complaints. When I reinstall, I have to go through the entire procedure from the top -- d/l'ing them all, using up my few 'licenses', making sure they are installed right and in the correct directory. It never goes smooth and as it should, for the reasons stated above: the system is not integrated and involves rigging things up after the fact to get them to work. I'm done with putting in that work, and if I do have to reinstall, I'll just turn music off and forget the name Jeremy Soules.

Oh it will be removed eventually, just watch. But directsong wont be the people who do it .

Well you can burn gw:en's soundtrack using windows media player.

Well if it's not an addon to the game, I'm not downloading it until it is.

For now, my main complain about DS music is that its volume its way lower compard to ganem music, I have to tune down all volumes but music, put music volume at max, and tune up sopeakers volume.

Which leads into the main reason a lot of people loathe DRM. All it does is cause problems for the people who paid for it. The people who want to pirate it will just get hold of a copy that has had the DRM stripped. Also allowing people to burn the music to CD's is giving them an easy way around it, not that this stopped people cracking the iTunes DRM simply because they could.

Basically I feel that by forcing me to use DRM, they are treating me like a criminal while doing nothing to stop the people actually making the pirated copies.

I find the idea that I should have to pay extra for higher-quality music rather objectionable; I mean, shouldn't that higher-quality music have been included in the game I've just spent my hard-earned cash on?

Also, while DS says it requires the "latest version" of WMP, I was unable to find on their website stating whether this referred to WMP9 or WMP10 (this was back when WMP was making the transition from 9 to 10).

Since my main gaming rig runs w2k, along with WMP7.1 (which I refuse to upgrade to WMP9), the whole thing was moot and I just blew it all off.

That said, I've never been dissatisfied with the sound as it is, leading me to wonder what benefit this higher quality sound would have given me anyway.

The one issue I ever noticed - the distortion on the sound produced by the Kappas on Shing Jea - was fixed long ago.

I never succeeded in obtaining my Nightfall CE bonus music. The DS installer just says gives an error, which googling around came up with the helpful comment that it seems to only affect people who don't use IE much.

I'll admit I didn't spend much time trying to resolve it (beyond obvious stuff like switching off firewalls), as I also find these schemes objectionable and didn't want to get sucked in with a freebie.

The funny thing about DRM is that companies put effort into DRM techniques that are almost always broken within a month of launch. I've already stripped the DRM from my DS because it was soothing music I wanted to listen to at the office. And the latest DRM scheme for High Def movies was cracked before it was even released on a product.

So, DRM makes sense only if your goal is to cause hassle for your customers while causing only about 2 seconds of extra work for the pirates.

Hmmm so if there isnt CD burning rights will i still be able to get the soundtrack on Itunes? Thats what i did with the proph Sound track. Burned it then ripped it to itunes.

GuildWars OST, Factions OST, Nightfall OST have burning rights to created an audio CD.

Gwen OST, Factions CE Bonus Pack, Nightfall CE Bonus Pack, Sorrow's Furnance, and the GW Battlepack, do NOT have cd burning rights.

The only music available for itunes is his Harry Potter video game ost's he has done. All of the GW have to be done via DirectSong and Microsoft's DRM.

i take it thats a no?-.-

Well how can you explain that I'm able to burn gwen ost on a cd with windows media player 11?



Well it's in french but it means that it's burning on a cd...and I used the original protected .wma files that the directsong installer downloaded.

=O im gonna see if that works.

Seems like its working so far =O

If you can read, then that is correct. ArenaNET exclusively releases through DirectSong.

And I have to say that reduces any chance of me buying the GWEN OST since it since I can't have CD burning rights. I thought it even weirder when the Bonus tracks didn't have this either. Not to mention that the DS support claims that all bonus tracks are included in the OST anyways, which I believe is complete and utter tripe.

Unless they plan to correct this issue later on with the GWEN OST when GWEN is released, I refuse to touch it.

I don't even want to get started on DiretSong's customer support when it comes to Windows Vista or even common errors. Like for example, their installers using flash of all things, WHO uses flash for that sort of thing?! And Vista is 6 months out of the gate and had multiple open betas. HOW hard was it to post or even HELP people with that problem of getting the DS in-game issue resolved. It took TRIAL AND ERROR FROM THE USERS HERE TO GET IT WORKING.

Sometimes I believe that companies like that need the wrecking ball.(I'm glaring at you Creative Labs.)

I just re-downloaded and they may of changed the rights. I will verify when I get home just in case I was in error.

I need to do something troubleshooting, it showing I don't have burn rights. Used WMP11 and no burn rights....

That's weird
I could burn without problem, and the "properties" windows of each track said "can be burned" or something like that.

Edit: I was thinking: "why would they (directsong) prevent us from burning this ost on an audio cd if they even included the cover art to print, in the same folder as the music files?"

Well i got it to burn....woooo!

Thanks for pointing out the Windows Media player thing NiukNiuk Caused no problem for me. I no longer regret buying it

I've checked my files. NONE of them have recording rights, althought they say that have in the Directsong homepage and I have the very last WMPlayer version, and original windows and anything required.

I'm starting to get very disappointed with them...

Well when i was at the folder for the music i opened it up clicked once on a song then it had an option to copy to audio disc. Then i dragged the rest over and tada!