Today marks a major change inside Project OutFox.

After roughly 25 years in the StepMania engine family, RageSound has been retired and replaced by SereneAudio.

Most players will never have encountered RageSound by name. It was not a menu option or a visible feature. It was one of the engine systems responsible for moving music, sound effects and keysounds from game content to the audio hardware.

RageSound supported StepMania and Project OutFox across several generations of computers and operating systems. It ran on machines ranging from Windows XP systems and PowerPC Macs to modern Windows and Linux hardware. It also carried years of compatibility work for sound devices, drivers and platform APIs that have long since disappeared.

That history matters, but it also came with a cost.

After more than two decades, the audio system contained assumptions, workarounds and limitations inherited from several different eras of hardware. Fixing one problem could disturb behaviour elsewhere, while adding modern functionality often meant working around architecture that had never been designed for it.

Continuing to patch RageSound would have kept those limitations at the centre of the engine. We chose to replace it instead.

SereneAudio is the new audio foundation for Project OutFox. It has been designed around the hardware and operating systems we support today, while retaining the compatibility needed by existing songs, themes, keysounds and gameplay systems.

This is not simply a renamed component. It gives us a cleaner system to build upon, reduces our dependence on inherited workarounds, and allows future audio development to be based on how OutFox now operates rather than how StepMania worked decades ago.

Retiring RageSound does not mean dismissing its history.

It kept the engine playing music through countless releases, hardware changes and operating-system transitions. Project OutFox could not have reached this point without the work that went into it.

RageSound carried the engine a very long way, SereneAudio takes it from here.