How experimental is the fb-native version?

Music looping is pretty important in my game, and I'm using SysEx events to do that. The wiki says that fb-native isn't very tested though, so I guess I'm testing?

What exactly are the differences between that version and others?

music_native is based on the audiere library, which hasn't been maintained in years. The only thing that stops me from giving up on music_native entirely is the relative crappyness of music_sdl :(

I suppose you want music with an intro that doesn't play again when it loops, right?

I wonder if we could support that with a optional totally separate intro file that could be played before a music file starts?

Yep, that's why exactly. I feel that its really limiting what my friends and I can do with music if the end of the song MUST somehow fade into the beginning.

The main issue is with battle music and the fanfare music. Anything in game can be done with scripting, I think.

Why don't the other libraries have support for the stuff the audiere library does? I feel like I can't be the only one who has ever wanted to set up loop points in music. (My music-making friend was initially very surprised when I told him we probably wouldn't be able to... for a while we were makings songs extremely long to emulate the loop. But it still feels unpolished doing it that way.)

Actually, not even audiere supports midi looping. No standard library anywhere (that I am aware of) has ever supported it, and it is not an official part of the midi spec. Audiere is used for all the other formats, and midi is played using some custom code that Mike wrote.

I wonder if any of the tracker formats can do what you want? XM, IT, S3M, one of them might support loop points.