Michael Klucher's Blog

XNA Game Studio provides several great features to enable easy game creation, but we may not do everything you need to produce a game. I’m always keeping an eye on sites and trying out programs that help make game production easier, more productive, or even more creative when it comes to developing games and using XNA Game Studio. Since I’m always on the lookout for these programs, I thought it would be cool to put together a weekly blog post that points to a program that may help you be more productive in your game development process.

Keep in mind that while I am letting you know about these programs, I am in no way vouching for the programs stability, safety, security or any other functionality intended or not intended. You are downloading and using the program completely at your own risk! Please follow safe computing practices when downloading any un-trusted software!

This week’s program was spotted on Download Squad and is called XRECODE. XRECODE quickly and easily converts audio formats individually or in batches. This is especially useful if you need to convert to a supported format so that the data can be imported into XNA Game Studio or used with the XACT tools. XRECODE supports a lot of features, but here were some of my favorites:

• Supports a large number of file formats: MP3, WMA, OGG, APE, FLAC, WavPACK, AAC, ALAC, and WAV.
• Will extract audio from several movie file formats.
• Command line support. You could write an XNA Framework Content Pipeline importer that invokes XRECODE and make the conversion part of your game build!
• Freeware! You should think about hitting up the donate page though if you integrate it into your workflow.

It’s simple to use and can get you out of a jam when you have audio that you need to get in a different format. You can check out more about XRECODE and download it from this link.

Hope you find this program (and the coming series of posts) useful, if you have an idea for another program that should be featured, please let me know about it and maybe it will be the star of next weeks post!