Sound and Music standard. Alex?

[PhilRoi]

Alex, I am told that there is no defacto standard for sound and music files beyond defining the filestypes:
.wav
.ogg

.wavs have many flavors on sample and mixrate.  can we define a standard so that submissions have greater consistancy?  You are a  big contibutor and I'm all set to start working on some serious sound contibutions of my own. (sound effect wise...)

What are your thoughts?

Phil

[Alex]

Wav's should be mono, 16 bit, 44.1Khz seems to be the standard around here.

I'm not too certain about the loudness of the samples however - in my experience the best way to produce a sample is to use the maximum amount of headroom without clipping - but this apparently produces sounds that are too loud for some people.  I've been told to make samples louder or quieter on a purely subjective basis, even if the actual samples in comparison have the same average RMS some people feel they differ in volume.  Personally I'd prefer a standard RMS volume level for all sounds with the game controlling the final mix levels...  But since that isn't the case, care must be taken to ensure that a given sample's volume sounds right when compared against all other samples in the game.

For the Ogg format, I use Sony's sound forge to encode a 32 bit 88.2khz wav, and I select the "CD Transparent" preset which seems to work fine- Average Bit Rate of about 96khz.

[Voller]

I don't know much about sound editing, but comparing sample volume by their RMS values doesn't make much sense to me. Unless I am mistaken, a sample with a lot of loud parts will have a higher RMS value than one with the same maximum amplitude, which has more quiet parts in it. E.g. if you consider a gun which is fired at 3 second intervals, its recording will have a lower RMS value than a recording of the same gun being fired at 1 second intervals.

Or am I talking nonsense here?

[Alex]

Pretty much if you have a sound that has a really loud part then fades out very quickly, its RMS will be somewhere in the middle.

What I meant to say was peak volume - but it was late and I'd had a couple of beers  :?

Ignore my crapping on about that.

[Voller]

it was late and I'd had a couple of beers  :?

Hehe, no need to apologise for that

[Alex]

Funny how everything makes sense when you're drunk

[qubodup]

concider .flac format as replacement for .wav and .ogg. It's a lossless compressed format, normally 33-66% size of wav.
Though it's probably a bad idea to use flac in-game, it would be good as a source format.