There are two devkits for Xbox 360: XNA and the other one. XNA doesn't support real-time audio synthesis, and the other one doesn't support developers who have an unrelated day job.
XNA games just render the music to a .wav file at compile time and then have the XNA tools convert that to .xma or whatever XNA games use for music. But that wouldn't work so well for a music game like Parappa or Vib Ribbon or Amplitude or DDR or Guitar/DJ Hero, especially because it's hard to determine the precise playback position. Nor would it work well for a game with a lot of sequenced music, like a 16-bit-style RPG. It has been suggested on a topic on XNA's official forum that the lack of a counterpart to Allegro's AUDIOSTREAM may have been an intentional measure to discourage the development of emulators that use copyright-infringing ROM files. This despite that someone named Shawn Hargreaves developed the Allegro library and someone whose forum nick is "Shawn Hargreaves" made posts in that topic.
tepples wrote:XNA games just render the music to a .wav file at compile time and then have the XNA tools convert that to .xma or whatever XNA games use for music.
Wow, IMHO that stands for almost everything that made videogame music turn boring (CD tracks versus soundchips). Nothing dynamic at all about it.
Pretty interesting though to see the posts there, getting to the point where someone proposed using one sine wave sample, and Fourier transforms to generate sounds. That's kind of cool, but talk about jumping through flaming hoops to do something simple..
