Audio help: make smaller WAVs in Vista

[Bob the Hamster]

Dude, if I need quality later, for like voices or something, then yeah, I'll probably put OGGs in it.

For EXTREMELY short sound effects, like blips and bleeps less than half a second, then yes, a WAV is your best bet..

..but once your effect is at least a second or longer, then using OGG will always be a huge win in terms of space saving. Even an ogg with quality set all the way up to 10 is going to be smaller than the smallest WAV you can make.

And in reality, for game sfx, you can take ogg quality all the down to 1 or 2 with no noticeable distortion, and you end up with a file that is much smaller than anything you can get in WAV format (again, the exception to this rule being super short sounds)

[Machu]

2 second sound effect.
168K in the original format from SFXR
84.2K when Audacity saves as a 8-bit WAV
63.2K as a quality 10 OGG
20K as a quality 0 OGG
7.99K when sndrec32.exe saves in my low-quality WAV format
can go lower for worse quality, as SFXR sounds don't really need fidelity.

If putting OGGs in it is no big deal, why are you wasting time trying to get WAV file size down?

Because they're smaller.

[Bob the Hamster]

2 second sound effect.
168K in the original format from SFXR
84.2K when Audacity saves as a 8-bit WAV
63.2K as a quality 10 OGG
20K as a quality 0 OGG
7.99K when sndrec32.exe saves in my low-quality WAV format

Wow! That is pretty amazing. Can you mail me one of these ultra-small WAV files? I would love to examine it and try to figure out exactly which WAV format variant it actually uses.

[Machu]

Let's see...

Here's an original:
http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/8/29/ ... /Hurt1.wav

And here's the Low-quality version currently in the game. I think I used... MP3 encoding with 22050hz and 32kbss, something like that.
http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/8/29/ ... Hurt1L.wav
Yes, there is quality loss, but not horribly.

[Bob the Hamster]

Wow! Interesting! I never new it was possible to put MP3 encoded data in WAV containers. (although I guess technically a WAV container is a RIFF container, which is a generic container format that could contain any dang crazy thing)

I was not able to find any WAV playing programs that could play that file. Audacity can open it, but only after detecting a corrupt WAV header and the searching and "recovering" MP3 data. madplay (command-line MP3 player) plays it as if it was an MP3 file.

So I guess it is a non-standard extension to WAV, but if Game Maker support it, then cool!