Compressing Sound and Music for a lighter mod

O Ilusionista

O Ilusionista

Captain 100K
Guys, this is the method I use on my mod to cut the overall size of the .pak
Its okay to have sounds/music folder bigger than all the rest of the folders, but sometimes we see a HUGE difference, which is a no go - because you can be sure there are some bloat into play.

FOR SOUNDS

1- Download GoldWave at www.goldwave.com
2- Go to FILE> BATCH PROCESSING
3- at the SOURCE tab, choose your SOUNDS folder (or put your whole DATA folder) but remind to set to only .WAV files
4- Go to CONVERT tab and choose this
QXyb9To.jpg

NOTE: THE IMAGE SAYS STEREO, BUT ITS BETTER TO USE MONO, UNLESS YOU HAVE SOME STEREO EFFECT.
5- At DESTINATION tab, choose to overwrite.

It will convert all your sounds to smaller file sizes. With the exception of rare cases, you don't need Stereo sound effects at all, it will just double your file sizes. 16 bits are better than 8bits (you can hear a HSSSSSS sometimes), but I remember that some ports doesn't likes it (Wii, for example). And since you won't hear the sound alone, you won't notice 80% of the time. And, at least, you can even set to 11000hz if you want, but the quality will be a bit lower. Again, you don't need a 48000hz sound effects.

FOR MUSIC
Convert all your .BOR files to .WAV (or get the original music files, its better)
All the steps until step 2 are the same.
3- At SOURCE tab, choose your MUSIC folder (or whatever your musics are). Again, set to only .wav files
4- Go to CONVERT tab and choose this
FNannc8.jpg

you can set to stereo (0.4q) if you want
5- the same step above.

Edit: There is an alternate method done by Beastie which let you have even smaller OGG files, take a look: http://www.chronocrash.com/forum/index.php?topic=1001.0
I use it with qulity 1 and it gives me light sound files.

The SOUND step will help you to have a lighter mod, but the MUSIC step is where all the bloat is gone.
 
I actually observed that Ogg is now a choice instead of BOR, by which I'm surprised was much lower in size than Ogg, only worse at sound (since it's just a WAV stripped off of some stuff, probably headers, and recompiled into another file type). I've used Ogg before actually, especially for Ren'py, which recommends it.

And since Ogg is open source, we don't worry about software licensing issues, except for the music licensing issues, that's another story.
 
Yes, this was the best ballance between quality and file size. If you go way too much into compression, you will loose too much quality and - like I had one time - you will have a file which crashes OpenBOR.
 
For music I just go with .ogg and forget it (obviously with carefully chosen compression values). Some platforms (PSP) don't like it, but well... I don't care. It's convenient, extremely size efficient and works perfectly on the PC. As a community leader and lead dev I have to support everyone. As an author, I'm free to be a jerkoff and go with my own preference. :P

DC
 
Since this has been bumped I'd like to ask the following.

What is the best sound rate and format for Wii build?

I need to fix most sounds for Neon Lighting Force mod because everything mostly gives a hiss. I also get a bunch of hiss on Super Final Fight GOLD PLUS.
 
I reduced the sound files in final fight gold plus to 8-bit - 6000Hz (overkill) and the hiss noise was replaced with the normal sound effects.
A added bonus the mod was reduced in size so much that it no longer crashes saying "out of memory" it may even work on psp phat now.
 
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