Ok, seriously, I am so ready to put this silly myth to rest. I've heard it from so many places and even heard that it is completely confirmed. I on the other hand have seen plenty of cases in which it cannot be even remotely possible and to be honest I'm absolutely sick of it. The myth of which I am speaking is obviously this story that, from one sound driver, card, or set of speakers to another that you could have such a delay on the music entailed with a sim chart that it throws the entire chart out of whack based on its gap. This is FALSE. I could concede that perhaps certain speakers will offset your music by maybe a few milliseconds (let me clarify 0.003 seconds) but that is hardly enough to make a gap seem completely broken.

Here is an example of a situation in which this is complete and utter crap. I download a chart uploaded on BMS to check the creator of said chart's ability to make charts, makes sense. I begin playing the chart, it is completely off sync in all possible ways, bpm was off, gap was off, but of course, without the right bpm the gap could be where ever the hell it wants to be and it'll be useless. SO, it leads to a unbiased party checking that file to one of my files and he claimed that they were both perfect and that I was experiencing a lag of sound based on my sound hardware/software. Now, using common sense, you can easily deduct that if HIS stepfile was offset so greatly by my sound equipment, then my stepfile would be off as hell to whomever could experience his chart correctly, and yet, this unbiased party was able to experience them both fine. The only applicable explanation is that the file that I was speaking of was changed since then, or the unbiased party was wrong, or the unbiased party... was biased. Who knows? Not I, but even further to use common sense on this fairytale... can anyone think of how many simfile creators there are out there? Think of how many there are, how many are good at it, and how many suck at it so bad you wanna headbutt the screen. Now... think about, say... WinDEU's work, you'll never hear about some silly sound problem with that stuff, why? Because he made a good simfile that is sync'ed well and not totally screwy. What about adding to an ITG machine? How could you even hope to come close if the sound hardware played such a big role to suddenly come up on sync with this huge sound system? What about j444mes's work? CMCM's? Does anyone see where I'm going with this? Is there any possibility at all that this story could be true, at least as far as StepMania and song sync'ing goes? NO.

I'll make no claim that sound hardware does not offset from one computer to another but StepMania obviously is not experiencing this problem. Somehow I suspect that most programs don't otherwise you'd have programs that play sound effects off sync with whatever caused them. You'd get shot in your FPS before you could hear the opponent fire. You'd hear victory music during the results screen, you'd see the nuke blow up your RTS home base, THEN you'd hear it go off. This isn't happening, gee what a mystery. However, I can tell you some programs that do experience it, video recorders, a lot of things that record video directly on the computer that recieve sound as well, Fraps, CamStudio, SWF to video converters, etc. Things that need to record video and sound simultaneously all experience lag in the audio. Some programs offer a sync for this, such as CamStudio, which actually has a customizeable offset for it's audio recording. Now whether that is hardware/software related or not I don't know, but it seems possible, and even likely, but it certainly isn't the speakers. Honestly if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this actually happens, I'll be completely surprised, because all of the evidence points in the other direction. I'm not saying that audible offsync doesn't happen to a degree, I'm just saying that I don't see it getting any moreso than several milliseconds. Which I suppose could possibly explain a lot of the goofy Globaloffset= variables out there, but when I say a lot in this instance, I mean of the few that actually exist because there really don't appear to be many people that mess with their offset.

In news for today, I've released a new NoteSkin that is actually, pretty much just meant to be screwy as hell. I call it Chaos, which is now also included in the VIP Notes 3D 3.95 Pack. There is not a single new image involved, in fact, this is the first dependant NoteSkin that VirInPro has released as it absolutely must be placed alongside the other 3D 3.95 NoteSkins released by us with the single exception of Ionic (only because it is a Cel type skin). However, since this NoteSkin contains no images the noteskin itself is only about 39kb. It really is intended mostly to make the already existant modifiers more difficult. If you happen to be a mod player, I suggest giving this psychotic thing a shot.

Finally, we have a submission from mandah4x, of all people, CMCM's girlfriend, for simfiling here at VirInPro. Unless for some reason the rest of the group absolutely hates her work and somehow I don't see that happening. CMCM should be joining soon after a successful submission. We intend to keep things going like this for awhile. As long as skilled people become interested we would love to see a huge amount of people inbound to this project.

And that's all for now. I'm tired.