A way to trigger switches/variables from an audio file

Hello,

it is probably a long shot, but I've been racking my brains over a certain problem.

There are a lot of ways to trigger music per plugin or event. My problem is that I need to tie actions by events closely to the music. Meaning I want to have sprites who sing and act out the music as it plays.

I can trigger the music and if the singing starts after say 5 seconds, I can let the event wait out 300 frames and start then (show the song text, for example), but the longer I string stuff like that together (for musical pieces that run several minutes), the more a slower PC who can't keep the frame rate up will mess up the whole thing. Presumably, players will have all kinds of setups, including slow ones, and I can hardly ask them to upgrade their hardware for me :)

If it were possible that the music file could trigger the switches for the events, that issue would not come up. Since I have little to no concept of how the bgm files interact with the game (or not), I have no idea whether that is actually possible. I am definitely open to alternative suggestions to deal with the problem, if someone has one.

Your idea have real problems, or there would have been a solution long ago.
The audio formats used by the RMs have been made for audio players originally, not for games - which means they do not contain any special signals or flags to trigger anything outside them.
so you basically have only very few options:
1) have someone create a new audioformat that would contain such data, with the problem that then the editor would have problems with them and that you would need a plugin to play those new audiofiles.
(so basically dead befor the work started unless you find someone enthusiastic about that work)
2) have a special player plugin that syncs the audio output with something else, either a second file containing the sync signals or notetags loaded from somewhere or whatever.
(and this is not easy and will only improve on the solution you described, it will not completely eliminate it because the base problem remains the same, syncing two independent data streams)

hmm, as I thought then, the audio file does not communicate with the game apart from playing the music on cue. I considered cutting the music into a number of shorter files. That way, it might be possible to introduce stop gaps, as in playing the next file only after the first finished. The ending of a track might be an impulse the game could recognise. But even if that works, the transition would need to be extremely smooth or it would come off like a row of skips on a LP.