Better audio format for sound effects

Caydr · Post by **Caydr** » 14 Feb 2006, 06:53

WAV format is ridulous in this day and age. nuff said. Since you don't want to use proprietary formats, how about OGG? That's cross-platform from what I know.

SinbadEV · Post by **SinbadEV** » 14 Feb 2006, 07:04

http://flac.sourceforge.net/

SwiftSpear · Post by **SwiftSpear** » 14 Feb 2006, 07:34

How about we use something that sound engineers can easily convert other standard formats to TBH...

FireCrack · Post by **FireCrack** » 14 Feb 2006, 10:38

I'd say vorbis. Flac is good, but you dont realy need that much quality, and it's better to keep size dwon.

child · Post by **child** » 14 Feb 2006, 10:44

WAV is still an industrystandard. Using a different format just for the sake of being hip sounds plain wrong to me. Also OGG would only make sense when used to encode huge datasets like musical scores. For small soundeffects WAV is perfectly fine.

Zenka · Post by **Zenka** » 14 Feb 2006, 14:46

Well, obious wav is very large, even for the short shounds. I loge OGG, it's good, nice, small and open source. Everything we stand for.
This would allow background music along in the package, only we have non.

Stregone · Post by **Stregone** » 14 Feb 2006, 15:50

ogg is used alot by game devs these days because its open source, so no stupid licensing fees to encode stuff.

Post by **Tim Blokdijk** » 14 Feb 2006, 19:36

Caydr wrote:WAV format is ridulous in this day and age. nuff said. Since you don't want to use proprietary formats, how about OGG? That's cross-platform from what I know.

Well, what is there to say, I agree.

Audacity is a fine GNU GPL cross-platform sound editor.
Supports OGG, MP3 and WAV.

AF · Post by AF » 14 Feb 2006, 20:25

I think if we're to support a new sound format, it should be ogg + mp3, with WAV for backwards. Those 3 are the most used of all the formats I am aware of anywhere be ti in games, general programs etc....

That and it gives us the necessary ability to implement the sound switcher implementation Warlord proposed for dynamic music. I wouldnt wanna convert all my mp3's to ogg to play them in spring, nor would my stepdad be happy about having 2 copies of every song in a different format on his hardrive, or ym sisters having to deal with a new format and demanding I put them all back to mp3 format etc....

Nemo · Post by **Nemo** » 15 Feb 2006, 00:35

Most music players can play ogg. We can't use mp3 since its got a liscense attached to it.

This sounds good to me. If ogg was good enough for UT2k4, I'd say its good enough for Spring.

GrOuNd_ZeRo · Post by **GrOuNd_ZeRo** » 15 Feb 2006, 05:59

I agree with AF, MP3 and OGG while still being backwards compatible with WAV would be the best solution, and also, I think Spring should have some sort of EAX support, otherwise we can use legacy support but it's a bit crude.

zwzsg · Post by **zwzsg** » 26 Feb 2006, 14:47

Wav is the sound format easiest to edit. All sound fiddling prgm can handle .wav. And the way it's written inside the file make it the most easier to write program from. It probably also ease Spring loading time that wav are so simple.

Also, Spring sounds are usually very short, less than 1 sec. I'm not fully certain we can really take advantage of the new compression algorithm on such short sounds clips.

Lastly, since mods come packed in zip of 7-zip, the larger size of wav isn't an issue. Althought 7-zip and zip aren't optimised for sounds files, they still reduce alot the filesize of sounds.

Overall, I'm not opposed to new sound format being used, but I'd like to hear some informed fact about what benifit it'll have (I can only see reduced filesize now), and what drawback it'll have (besides Spring dev time, I imagine there'll some performance loss due to the sound decompression algorithm, but have no idea if it'll really be noticeable). And obviously wav should still be suported, but that goes without saying.

AF · Post by AF » 26 Feb 2006, 17:27

Well first off not all these files in future would be 'small'.

Dynamic music as described in the suggestion warlord zsinj would require mp3 or ogg format compatibility in order to play them otherwise we're stuck with hudnreds of megabytes of soundtrack rather than 3/4MB per file

zwzsg · Post by **zwzsg** » 28 Feb 2006, 03:03

Well, I was thinking mainly about explosion, guns firing, vehicle humming, which have to be short, because so many can be heard at once.

For music, the problem is clearly different, and I agree that wav should not be used for music. It's just the last time I checked there was no music in Spring and no plan (besides forum talk) to add some.

renrutal · Post by **renrutal** » 28 Feb 2006, 03:51

You should also look for audio formats that don't need much processing power to decode their content, after all we are playing these files a lot of times a second. WAV may be big, but the PCM it holds is very lightweight since it's uncompressed.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 28 Feb 2006, 11:55

.wav files are used because they require zero processing to decompress them into a usable state(that is it is trivial to code and thus easy), and since they are normlal ultra short for most in-game sounds this is perfectly fine.

The only reasonable sound library to use is fmod, it is free for freeware and more importantly is a bloody good sound library. It can also handle most types of audio files too.

malric · Post by **malric** » 28 Feb 2006, 15:42

From what I read so far

- for the short sounds there is still no argument why anything different than the wav would be better (besides size and the gain in size would be a loss of speed so it is not a clear gain)

- for the music I do not think anybody suggested wav anyway, but I would say that there are many other important things. Usually I turn off the game music anyway and use my own.

Spring RTS Engine

Better audio format for sound effects

Better audio format for sound effects

Re: Better audio format for sound effects