Another suggestion.

While browsing electronic music on Jamendo, i found out 2 tracks on CC license allowing comercial usage, which could at least partially fit Vendetta's climate.

http://www.jamendo.com/album/85671 - Track 3
http://www.jamendo.com/album/830 - Track 1

I took me about 20 minutes to find these two. With more time spent, it is surely possible to find much more better fitting music with free-for-commercial-use license.

So why not use some of it in VO ? It doesn't cost anything after all. Optionally, it is probably possible to contact owners of albums with more restrictive licenses asking how much do they want for few tracks. Perhaps they will want little money.

So why not use some of it in VO ?

VO's music is better. Just because it's free doesn't mean you should use it.

Yes, VO's music is nice. Problem is there isn't enough of it, so it gets boring. What would be nicer is if there was more of the type of music we have, plus an equal amount of some alternate styles that you could select from. This would of course increase the download and install sizes, which is bad.

Doesn't bother me much though. I just play my own music outside VO. No game can ever have a perfect soundtrack. The best thing to do would be to make it a bit easier to have VO itself play your external music. Yes, it can be done already, but it's not elegant. The advantages to having VO play your music rather than a separate media player are that then VO can mute the music when VC is active, and controlling the music can be done without having to switch out of the game, which I imagine is much more annoying for people without dualscreen setups.

@space99(9)

[[[VO's music is better. Just because it's free doesn't mean you should use it.]]]

Of course that it is better than the Jamendo tracks I have shown you, but that is not the point.
There is a lot of similiar quality OR better music on Jamendo, unfortunately most of it is probably not free for commercial use.
So the idea is to search the directory and find some tracks that match VO's ones in matter of quality and climate, so we can use them immediately.

Jamendo also has pretty cool semi-automated music license sale programs, which allows one to buy license for the tracks that are normally not free for commercial use.

So a lot of possibilities is out there to improve - that is all I am saying.
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@Pizzasgood

[[[Yes, VO's music is nice. Problem is there isn't enough of it, so it gets boring. What would be nicer is if there was more of the type of music we have, plus an equal amount of some alternate styles that you could select from.]]]

Exactly my argument.

I agree we need more decent music
(I turned mine off most of the time since I been playing a while - same old tracks, is boring).

PoL suggestion looks like it has merit.
There is a flaw tho .... Guild Software C.O. is very particular about his I.P.
I doubt he would include these outside, C.C. tracks.
Though he should - he can always swap them out for home-grown ones at a later date before a Due Dili.

Or maybe we just pipe this shtuff in on the VC channel? seems like if you connect to VC, you're all on the same public channel anyway, not private group-based channels.

Music over VC is fun sometimes, but it does get old. Using VC for VC is more interesting. In general I'd rather play my music from local high quality files than listen to stuttering low quality VC broadcasts. Though the other day somebody played "Magic Carpet Ride" and it sounded like a shoddy radio broadcast, which was really neat - seemed like I had a proper radio in my Greyhound playing it. I might need to get or write a filter for Audacious to make normal music come out that way for a change of pace sometimes :)

What I would enjoy would be a way for plugins to see the contents of a part of the filesystem within a plugin directory (say, plugins/<plugin_name>/files/), because then we could make plugins to offer a nifty little radio system. As it is now, you would have to manually tell the plugin which files exist. A way to query whether a track is playing, which track it is, and the progress, would also be nice. You can do that via the chat system, but I don't know if there's a way to do it via lua. I'll have to look into that sometime. Currently my (unfinished and unreleased) combat music plugin uses a prebuilt table of filenames and song durations in conjunction with a timer, but that's fairly lame IMO.

VO does need some more music. I posted a suggestion a while back to use the training sector musics elsewhere in the game, since it's a neat song but you rarely ever hear it.

Bandpass filter and add noise, Pizzasgood. You might also be able to fake it with the EQ. :)

You could use something like MPD and write a VO plugin to connect to that via TCP/IP for an in-game interface. Bonus points if it looks all futuristic and space-y. :D