Version Problems...

See, and I was going to make this post about how cool and awesome the XACT audio tool was for sound engineering. But instead, this post is about how screwy version control and backwards compatibility can be.

I'm having some odd version problems with XACT and Game Studio 2.0 or 3.0 (it's hard to tell which is causing the problems). The XACT audio tool is what enables you to create sound banks for XNA games.

At this point, one solution (sort of) appears to be to make a new sound bank with all the sounds in it. Which believe it or not is a little more complex than simply including a bunch of wav files in one collection. And honestly, that was supposed to be the 'cool' part...unless I have to do the whole thing twice.

Bottom line...or as much as I can tell right now...is that I began this project with Game Studio 2.0, which came with the XACT 2.0 tool. Then I had to upgrade to Game Studio 3.0 (all XNA submissions must be in 3.0 at this time). Well Game Studio 3.0 came with the XACT 3.0 audio tool...HOWEVER...the 3.0 audio tool was not compatible with Game Studio 3.0. (Yeah, I have no idea how THAT passed any kind of QA). This is an error they fixed in Game Studio 3.1. So you'd think everything would be cool (now). But it looks like (judging from the XNA forums), that if you start a project with an older version of Game Studio...it won't accept newer file format of XACT.

Ok, so worst case is that I have to recreate all the audio I just finished in XACT 3.0....back in the 2.0 version since any sound bank created with XACT 2.0 seems to work fine. ACCEPT for the funny thing call the XACT auditioning tool which is another app that runs in the background along with XACT that enables you to listen to the sounds you're creating in XACT. Without the auditioning tool...you can't hear a single thing of what you're creating. The totally cool and awesome part now is...the 3.0 version of the auditioning tool deleted/overwrote the 2.0 version. So now, if I try to use the XACT 2.0 tool to recreate the sounds....I can't listen to a single thing I'm doing.

So....a bit stuck on audio at the moment. Still searching the forums for a better answer than the one I've found so far.