Load mp3 from Harddrive on PC (again)

Questions & Answers
1

Hi,

Wea are currently evaluating Unity to find out whether we can use it (free or pro license) to create our game. While the initial tests all worked out well, we have encountered a problem:

There seems to be no way to load mp3’s from a users hard drive. Why is that? I have found a lot of questions on this topic but none gave an usable solution. Some suggest using the WWW class and give it OGG as an AudioType, that removes the “Streaming of ‘mp3’ on this platform is not supported” error, but the returned clip is still null.

We don’t even want to stream the mp3s, just load them into memory. Is it a legal issue? Can it be solved by aquiring specific mp3 licenses? Why does it work on mobile devices, but not on pc?

Some suggested using different versions of Unity, or setting the stream-flag to false, but so far nothing worked. The Assetfolder Pro feature will be no help, because we need the user to load files from his/her harddrive.

greetings

2

Hey FreetimeCoder,

I’m sorry to tell you this, but Unity’s version of FMOD only supports MP3s on mobile devices, due to licensing fees. If you still want to use Unity, you can use a third party dll for playing MP3s, and load the MP3 files using Unity’s WWW class. If you plan on releasing your application, you’ll need an MP3 license, however you would need that on any platform.

In case you haven’t considered it, Unity’s version of FMOD does support .WAV and .OGG ( http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/AudioFiles.html ), so you could easily use those. Anyway, I hope you figure out if Unity is the right engine for your plans, and I wish you the best of luck!

Gibson