Comments on: Playlist: Min/Maxing Music in your 4e game.

By: snuh

snuh — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:59:17 +0000

I’m curious to see where this series goes and hopes it gets continued soon. A year or so ago I started using music in our games and it’s been a significantly positive addition.

At the risk of being two cents poorer, here’s my take. When it works well, nobody notices it most of the time. Every now and then the mood at the table and the music come together in perfect harmony, and everyone gets a stupid happy grin on their face at how awesome that moment was.

When it doesn’t work well, it’s because the DJ has put on a track that isn’t quite right, or there’s just something off-mood in the music. Or the track volume is too high or low. Or someone is fiddling with the playlist. Any of these problems can be jarring.

But the main issue for me is playlist management. I’m in the process of tagging all my music in MediaMonkey with things like “Suspense”, “Stealth”, “Horror”, “Combat”, “Sacred”, “Exotic”, etc. I’m hoping some day building a playlist will be a rather quick and easy process and not the fairly time-consuming chore it is now.

Huh. Much of my gaming music can be downloaded free and legally. I’d be happy to email you links and suggested tags if you wanted to run a “Gaming Music of the Week” series.

By: focusgents

focusgents — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:16:13 +0000

i’ve been trying this out the last few weeks: email the track to the PC’s a few days before, let them listen and imagine what it might be connected to, and bam! that music just got pivotal

By: hbunny

hbunny — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:13:12 +0000

I’ll put in a plug for Pandora. I have a doc for my iPhone plugged into a nice set of computer speakers. I usually start a station with a song from one of Brian Eno’s Ambient albums. After a few sessions of rating the selections to weed out the electronica and new-agey stuff, I now have a nice random playlist of haunting background music that doesn’t detract from play.

By: Asmor

Asmor — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 20:11:28 +0000

I humbly suggest Media Monkey as the pinnacle of music management software. Blows everything else out of the water, in terms of managing a large library.

Only downside is the less-than-perfect support for newer iPods. That’s not their fault, of course. They do the best they can– and do pretty well, actually– but Apple’s defective-by-design mentality makes 3rd party iPod support an uphill battle.

By: Jeremy Southard

Jeremy Southard — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:33:00 +0000

I really like to use http://www.radiorivendell.com – they have lots of good tracks from fantasy movies and games and there’s no playlist to mess with as you just listen to whatever they’re streaming. There have been a few times were players at the table have commented “Hey! That’s from Lord of the Rings!” or some such like that, getting the players even more excited due to the soundtrack of their current encounter. The Radio Rivendell website also has a pretty long list of downloadable fantasy-based music ( http://www.radiorivendell.com/index.php?pageId=21 ) in case you prefer to setup different playlists for “in town”, “in the forest”, or “boss battle”.