This may not be the correct board for this query, but it seemed to be the best fit. Does anyone have any suggestions for resources on choosing audio formats to be used in game projects? Thanks - Brickhouse

Good old fashioned windows .wav files work just fine for your basic sound effects. Now, if youre going to9 have 13 hours of sound effects, a la Grand Theft Auto, you might have to worry about specific aspects of the format, putting strict controls on samplerates and whatnot, but for now, plain old .wav Windows PCM.

For music, you cant go wrong with Ogg Vorbis, unless youve got strict size limitations, in which case you want to bark up the tree of tracker formats, but that represents a fundamental shift in the creation process(music has to be made for tracker formats, it cant really be "converted". )

We went to .ogg files for anything longer than a second or two, simply because the .wav filesizes got out of control. Ogg seems to do pretty much everything that we need.

Wonderful! Thanks for the responses.

If you're looking to shave file size overhead off of lots and lots of sound effects, without incurring the overhead of decoding a thousand tiny .ogg files, always remember that not all sound effects need to be in stereo at a super high sample rate.

On a whim, I decided to take a look at how GTA:SA stored all those sound effects, since they have thousands and thousands of short speech clips, with characters and pedestrians and everything.

Cut scenes were stored as .oggs, as you might expect, but the many many random world sound effects were all wrapped up into one gigantic, low sample-rate .wav file. I suspect the value of putting them all together cut down a lot of overhead for file headers and whatnot, and the game must be addressing directly to file offsets. There was easily 2 hours of incidental sound effects in a file that was(if I remember correctly) a couple dozen megabytes, because incidental speech clips dont need to have a particularly high quality, nor do they need to be in stereo since they will be placed in 3D.