Question about sound encoding

Post by **Iris** » December 18th, 2007, 3:53 pm

hyperactivething wrote:My opinion would be to package ogg files with the game, and store the originals as flac files in the repository. I think that makes more sense.

I have suggested that too many times already to the other developers (as with keeping PNG portraits in the resources SVN branch and shipping JPEGs with Wesnoth), but the fact that I'm a recent addition on my own seems to make me have a very weak influence in the decission chain.

And no, I was actually talking about file size.

I'll do some tests with Wesnoth's music tracks instead, vonhalenbach's comparison doesn't tell me much if the test case is just 1 sec. long and has not enough variety in it. Id est, we all know that continuous sounds are compressed better (even in lossless formats) than noncontinuous sounds, those that we call music.

Weeksy · Post by **Weeksy** » December 18th, 2007, 10:37 pm

the thing with jpgs is that they just look shoddy. I can see how an ogg would be useful, as having highest quality music isn't really necessary, it just has to sound reasonable.

Post by **Iris** » December 20th, 2007, 2:44 pm

JPEGs do look reasonable if you don't scale their size (an ugly thing done in Northern Rebirth for portraits). Most portraits are heavy and yet never scaled. But heh, that's for other discussion thread.

I'm starting to think that these issues don't call other developers' attention if they are not:

a) brought to the development mailing list;
b) brought to the development forum

BTW Ogg Vorbis music sounds good enough for me at quality level 2. Lower than that it starts to sound horrible. And most music tracks in Wesnoth seem to use quality level 3.

Post by **Boucman** » December 21st, 2007, 5:53 pm

Shadow Master wrote: I have suggested that too many times already to the other developers (as with keeping PNG portraits in the resources SVN branch and shipping JPEGs with Wesnoth), but the fact that I'm a recent addition on my own seems to make me have a very weak influence in the decission chain.

Oooookayyyyy

quick lesson from an old dev to a new dev full of hope

it's not that we don't listen to you, it's that nothing ever moves in wesnoth unless someone does it.

if you really care about something. To have a big change in, the process is

1) post the ml a message saying something like "I'll do that next thursday unless someone stops me"
2) usually, nobody will protest, if someone does, you're lucky, you had some feedback

discuss a little, there is probably something he or you havn't considered, these discussions are usually friendly, so go for it
3) commit your changes

this is true for all devs, old or new.

Post by **vonHalenbach** » December 21st, 2007, 9:22 pm

Interesting

Sounds more like a pirate shouts over the garden wall, that he will come tomorrow to you to dinner. If you forget to shout back "NOOOO!", you will have a new guest.

Btw, i don't really think anymore that we need this feature. We can convert all wavs and the music files to flac anyway just for storing and use ogg for all sounds and music files distributed with the game, because it makes so lovely small files.

If someone really wants to implement flac, then do it in SDL, so that other projects can make use of your hard work.

Post by **Jetrel** » December 22nd, 2007, 9:25 am

Boucman wrote:it's not that we don't listen to you, it's that nothing ever moves in wesnoth unless someone does it.

This is true. If you want something to happen, you need someone who cares enough to go to the significant effort of doing it. For practically all things, this tends to mean that the only candidate who is going to care enough is you yourself. It's -rare- that this is not true. However, once you actually start something, and get the general ball rolling, it's likely that some others will help you out, if your change is good.

For one example, not too far back, I got sick of our old pixel-art attack icons, and decided to embark on a project of replacing them with the more painterly ones we now have. Until I (and leonhard, who helped spur me to do it) made significant headway on the project, a lot of people were on the fence about whether we should or should not do it.

A simple metaphor would be a messy bookshelf - if you go to the trouble of organizing all the books alphabetically (or whatnot), we're likely to follow the new rules and keep them in that order. However, unless you take the initiative to do it, we're all probably too busy to take it on the initial job of organization, ourselves.