High-quality sounds

[Sheekel]

The OTA sounds currently used by most mods are the 11khz ones used in OTA. For the next spring release could these be updated (they are stored in otacontent.sdz) to high-quality 44khz ones found below:

http://www.unknown-files.net/spring/fil ... hz_EQ_etc/

[Gota]

Yes,please.

[Argh]

Um... all that was done was to raise the size of the files, whoever did this didn't really do anything to deal with the low bitrates. Took a listen, and I'm afraid to say that I simply don't know why anybody thought this was a good idea.

You cannot turn 11kHz sound into 44kHz sound and have it magically sound better, without adding new sound to broaden the range of the data.

It's like taking a low-resolution image and blowing it up- the data's still the same, you've just enlarged the file size. Sorry guys, it just doesn't work like that, whatever "improvement" you're hearing is in your heads.

[Gota]

I didnt eve nlisten to it.
Sheekel i out my trust in you. =<

[Argh]

I'm not trying to diss Sheekel, Gota. I just think that if higher quality is the goal, then it's going to require a little more work than that.

[Gota]

Just need new sounds thats all.

[REVENGE]

Can we simply allow weapon sounds and whatnot to be ogg? As in, let cob play ogg files.

[Argh]

Well, at the risk of sounding abrupt... no.

1. OGG is a streaming format. It confers no real performance advantages when it's actually playing (i.e., once decompressed, it's all PCM WAV in the end, folks).

2. Spring only allows one OGG to run at a time.

3. Decompressing OGG on the fly is costly.

4. There are no real problems with having many, many sound files at 44kHz, each 60-500K in size. Modern sound cards are OK with nice large files, and while the CPU use isn't negligible, it's acceptable.

In short... there isn't any magical way around these things. OGG's for music, it works great for music... and it's never going to be a good choice for small sounds like weapons. But it doesn't matter, tbh- I have never seen CPU use because of sounds become a major performance factor, and P.U.R.E. has a lot more sound going on than anything in the OTA realm.

[REVENGE]

Fine, then can we implement MP3? Or FLAC? Look, I wouldn't mind having the system decompress everything to WAV while a mod loads, I just need to reduce the filesize of the mod.

[Argh]

MP3, no, because it's not a GPL-friendly license. Dunno about FLAC.

And... er... how much size are we talking about, here?

My entire folder of 44kHz sounds in P.U.R.E., which about as many sounds as OTA (160+ sounds at this time), is like 16MB... before being compressed. After compression, it's maybe 3-4MB. Compared to, say, model skins, it's almost trivial in terms of filesize, tbh.

[REVENGE]

Well unfortunately, I still try to be considerate to people without broadband, so I like to limit my filesize below 10 megs, which is probably not doable if I replaced all of my current wavs with stuff sampled at 44kHz.

EDIT: Wait, what? 160+ sounds? How is that under 16 megs? I mean, some of my sound files are 1 meg uncompressed.

[[Krogoth86]]

Well even with just putting the sample rate up most of those sounds are a bit better imo. Probably because of some kind of interpolation they don't sound as dull as the original ones. The difference isn't all too amazing and might not be worth the additional filesize but well - here you have two examples how both versions sound (attachments). The first thing you'll hear is the original one, the second thing you'll hear is that upsampled mix from that package...

[Argh]

I like to limit my filesize below 10 megs

By today's standards, that's tiny. Heck, I've seen Flash games in that range. TBH, I wouldn't be that worried about it. Then again, the entire P.U.R.E. package is over 160MB, and growing...

some of my sound files are 1 meg uncompressed.

The largest soundfile in P.U.R.E. is 301KB.

What are you doing? Recording multiple seconds, for game sounds that need to be nice and short? Using stereo? That's bizarre...

[Hoi]

It suprised me that 60mb in pure is the soundtrack.

[REVENGE]

No argh, that particular file is a long death sound (couple of seconds), sampled at 44k mono.

[Argh]

Oh, so it's just a death sound? Not something that plays a lot? That's fine then, don't worry yourself over it, it won't cause performance problems.

[Sheekel]

My apologies for misleading everyone with this thread, I never actually bothered to listen to them either