ogg files and making the smallest songs possible

tim · June 05, 2007, 17:05:46

Hello.
I've ben using modplug tracker for about 3 years now, partially for the purpose of creating music for PC games. A project has come up where I have to make as much music as possible without drastically changing the download size of the game.
All my game music is in .ogg form, but I'm thinking of reducing the size even more by first oggifying the samples, then the song.
I would just research this myself, but I'm in transition right now and my equipment is packed in boxes, and I have to know if it can be done by the end of the week so I can get the job.
My question is: would this technique make a big difference in file size, and are there any examples out there of ogg files with ogg samples so I can listen to the quality and know the approximate size of music done in this way?
Any other ideas reguarding miniscule song files are welcome.

Saga Musix · June 05, 2007, 17:10:52

if you are composing modules and are releasing your games in a windows or mac environment, AND you're using the BASS library, the tool MO3 may be the tool you need.

EDIT: If the download size is the only thing that matters: there's a tool called unmo3 that's included with mo3, it unpacks the mo3 files. so after the installation of your program, you could simply call unmo3.

LPChip · June 05, 2007, 17:26:51

If you are going to make an .Ogg file from the outcome, then it doesn't matter how the song itself is being constructed.

You can add alot of big samples to your song, and then save to wav or ogg and the filesize will not change.

Since .OGG, .WAV and .MP3 are streamed files, their filesize is based on the length of the song multiplied by their bitrate. (sort of)

So if you have a 4 minute lengthy song, and you'd apply a 100 k bitrate to it, the target song would be about 4 mb big.

tim · June 05, 2007, 17:41:31

Quote from: "LPChip"If you are going to make an .Ogg file from the outcome, then it doesn't matter how the song itself is being constructed.

You can add alot of big samples to your song, and then save to wav or ogg and the filesize will not change.

Since .OGG, .WAV and .MP3 are streamed files, their filesize is based on the length of the song multiplied by their bitrate. (sort of)

So if you have a 4 minute lengthy song, and you'd apply a 100 k bitrate to it, the target song would be about 4 mb big.

I'm a bit thick when it comes to technical data. I apologize, and i am working to fix that. :oops:

My world says that .OGG files are small and low quality and .WAV files are big and high quality and there's stuff in between, so i'm not sure what you mean when you say I can save a song to ogg or wav and the filesize will not change. I've never seen a 30mb ogg.
From what you've said, though, I guess my question is, what is a bitrate and how do i get small ones?

kit beats · June 05, 2007, 19:08:56

you mean 16 bit or 32 bit? or is that not bitrate?

LPChip · June 05, 2007, 20:42:15

Tim,

My appologies. You bring up a fair point there.

MP3 and OGG are compressed files, and WAV is not.

WAV is indeed much bigger, as it has a fixed bitrate (you could see it that way) and this bitrate is alot higher than with MP3 or OGG.

The comperation only goes for MP3 and OGG.

Basically, the lower the bitrate, the less bass and trebble your song will have.

A bitrate of 128 is a standard for internet and has alot of quality in it. Lower is possible but it has a drain. The best thing you can do is making 1 WAV file, and compress it to different formats and compression, and then see what compression is small yet still acceptable to use for your needs.

LPChip · June 05, 2007, 20:43:25

Quote from: "Samplekit"you mean 16 bit or 32 bit? or is that not bitrate?

No, he ment the bitrate of encoding. I'm not even sure there's a 32 bit version of OGG and MP3. Wav, yes, but not sure on the compressed formats.

Sam_Zen · June 06, 2007, 01:32:47

Yep, things like this ask for experimenting and testing the results.
A nice simple tool for this is Oggdrop, a WAV<-->OGG converter. A small floating box on your screen on which you can drag
and drop a WAV-file, and it starts converting. Settings-dialog is found with a R-click on the box.
I checked the bitrate range in "Encoding options' and it goes from 45 to 499 kbps. Here are the OS-versions :
P3 - P4 - generic .

An addition about compression :
Making WAV-files smaller with MP3 or OGG has a price. It's 'lossy' compression, which means that some sound-data is definitely gone. If you would convert the OGG back to WAV, it's impossible to get the same original again.

Quote from: "tim"I'm a bit thick when it comes to technical data. I apologize, and i am working to fix that.

No need for apologies. Learning is a joy.
You could have expected this, because your topic has a technical nature.

rncekel · June 06, 2007, 16:08:26

Remember that there are different qualities, both in MP3 and OGG files. The lowest the quality, the bigger the compression. Most converters let you tweak some parameter for this purpose. You must find out but trial and error which is the best choice for you.
WAV files are too big for download. If you really need the full quality, you should consider the FLAC format, (Free Lossless Audio Compression), that can reduce the size to about half without any lose. But this seems quite unlikely for a game.
There are some analysis that seem to prove that for similar qualities of sounds, ogg format is a little bit shorter than mp3.

Sam_Zen · June 06, 2007, 23:06:21

Quoteyou should consider the FLAC format

Absolutely right. But I didn't mentioned it, to avoid getting things more complicated

I suppose the connection of OGG and games is the fact that this format can be multichannel.

mrvegas · June 07, 2007, 21:15:49

You can probably get mp3 and probably ogg files acceptably down to a 64k bitrate for game purposes, but as someone above noted, for listening purposes 128k is pretty much the standard low-end number. 192k and above will give you very good quality.