Hello, everybody. I'm not nearly close to this point, but when I finally get to the point where I can create 3D games, I'm of course going to need to create music to go with these games if I want them to have any sort of musical flavor. However, I understand that a lot of music files can be a burden on a project if the file sizes get to be too much. I was wondering which file format for the music files themselves I should create, whether they be .mp3, .aif, .midi, or .wav (or any other formats which I'm unfamiliar with). I'm looking for the best quality while keeping file sizes down, and take into consideration that I don't know a whole ton about the process yet (I just know how to write music and make .aif and .mp3 files, that's about it). Reason I want to know this now is so that I can do enough research on it and be ready to start using the knowledge when the time comes where I get that opportunity. Thanks in advance. :]

Thats mostly a personal choice, depends on your project.
I use OGG for background music (this usually is streamed from disk), and WAV for the rest (sound effects, speech, etc, and those are usually loaded at once into memory)
I think for MP3 you'll need some kind of license, but I'm not sure about that.

I forgot about Ogg Vorbis. Does OGG take up less space compared to other audio formats?

Quote: Original post by Noegddgeon
I forgot about Ogg Vorbis. Does OGG take up less space compared to other audio formats?

Yes, its compreesed audio, similar to mp3.

Ogg may be compressed and a lossy format like mp3 yet it takes more processing power to decode. That is really mp3's selling point but on the downside it does require a licence.

Ogg all the way, even for sound effects. Great quality, small files, wide support and royalty-free - doesn't get any better than that. There's even a great vorbis decoder in a single .c file that you can drop directly into your project.

Stay away from mp3, as it entails licensing costs.

Midi is used only in audio production nowadays, while AIFF is comparable to WAV - huge, uncompressed files or subpar compression codecs.

Oh, ok, thanks for all the information, you guys... I remember downloading Frets on Fire one time and looking at some of the stuff in the package, and there were lots of .OGG files, so I guess that would be the reason. :]

Hey Noegddgeon!

You'll also want to note that MIDI isn't an audio format. It doesn't carry any audio or media information. It's a protocol that communicates or controls other devices, such as a synthesizer or instrumental sampler.

Thanks!

George

grhufnagl,

That's right, I totally forgot about that... I even took a class on music tech, too. -_-

Thanks for the clarification :]. But didn't Final Fantasy VII for PSX use midi files for the music? I read that somewhere, because they didn't have enough space or something to use any other music format. By this, did it perhaps mean that they used midi files to create sounds using a coded instrument interface built into the game? Not sure if you would know unless you've played the game, but just wondering. :]

@Noegddgeon - You are correct. FFVII used midi files played back with the built in synthesizer that came with the PSX. If you played the PC version, they offered a software synth to attempt to capture that same quality over the standard instruments found on most PC sound cards at that time.

I totally agree with using the OGG format, but there is an alternative that no one seems to have mentioned yet, MOD files. They are essentially a midi file that has the collection of "instruments" included in the file. Well tracked MOD files can sound almost as good as their larger MP3/OGG brethren in a fraction of the disk space, though at the expense of a little more processing power.