Sounds ogg ... Music m4a

SharkawyDevSharkawyDev Member Posts: 225
edited December 2011 in Art, Graphics, Music and Sound
m4a size is pretty big so shall i convert it to ogg ? or there is another way to compress it without affecting quality.

im using GarageBand and it's not saving ogg files so is there a conversion or something i can use ?

Comments

  • SlickZeroSlickZero Houston, TexasMember, Sous Chef Posts: 2,870
    Save it out of GarageBand as an .mp3. I have been doing it this way lately, and have had no sound issues whatsoever.

    GameSalad uses .ogg for sound, and .m4a for music. It will automatically convert the .mp3 for you when you import it, after it asks you if you want to import as sound or music. I export at 96 kbps mono out of GarageBand because I like higher quality sound, or as high quality as possible. You could export a lot lower than 96 kbps if you want.
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  • SparkyidrSparkyidr Member Posts: 2,033
    edited December 2011
    You can also convert your music wav (or mp3) to m4a (aac) in itunes...and itunes gives you a LOT of control over how big the resulting output will be

    Add the wav to your itunes music library, by just dragging and dropping into iTunes.

    In the iTunes preferences, go to import settings, and choose "custom". You can then choose things like the bit rate, and if you need it mono or stereo. (mono files with be half the size of stereo m4a files)

    Once you have chosen, go back to the file in your music library in iTunes, right click, and choose "Create AAC version"
    When it's done, you can drag out it out of itunens into a folder/onto your desktop etc ready to import into GS

    When I work for clients, I tend to do 2 versions.
    A stereo 192kbps version -- for nice quality
    A mono 96kbps version -- for file saving

    but the lower the kbps, the smaller the file size......with a hit on the quality of course.
  • calvin9403calvin9403 Member Posts: 3,186
    I use aducity for all my sounds

    it works great
  • QuinnZoneStudiosQuinnZoneStudios Member Posts: 452
    Yes both iTunes and Audacity all work well with the correct settings.
    One program I use a lot is Max. It's free and gives you a lot of conversion control. I highly recommend it:

    http://sbooth.org/Max/

    Good luck with it,
    Mike
  • CloudsClouds Member Posts: 1,599
    edited December 2011
    @Slickzero

    "GameSalad uses .ogg for sound, and .m4a for music. It will automatically convert the .mp3 for you when you import it, after it asks you if you want to import as sound or music. I export at 96 kbps mono out of GarageBand because I like higher quality sound, or as high quality as possible. You could export a lot lower than 96 kbps if you want."

    . . . . . . .

    96 kbps is really low (noticeably low) quality. From what I can see GS converts incoming audio to 128 kbps, so making your source file 96 kbps would be a mistake - if anything the incoming audio should be higher quality so the down conversion doesn't lose too much quality.

    Also bouncing out of Garageband in mono means your music (rather than 'sounds') will, of course be in mono - this will not save any memory, just make your music files moon.

    You should export uncompressed audio from GarageBand / WAV or AIFF @ 44.1 kHz (or higher) / 16bit (or higher).
  • SlickZeroSlickZero Houston, TexasMember, Sous Chef Posts: 2,870
    My reference to 96 kbps being high quality is based off the common use of audio files in projects. Lots of people use lower than 96kbps @ 22 kHz for their audio. 96 kbps is low quality when compared to raw data, but for my project file size, this is the option I use. I can get a 30 second loop exported around 300k. And again, I use these settings for file size. The file sizes don't change when imported, at least not enough to register. And the iPhone, if I remember correctly, doesn't play stereo, I believe the iPod does, but the iPhone is mono.
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  • CloudsClouds Member Posts: 1,599
    @SlickZero "My reference to 96 kbps being high quality is based off the common use of audio files in projects. Lots of people use lower than 96kbps @ 22 kHz for their audio."

    I might have to do some tests to be absolutely sure about this later tonight if I get a chance - but here are my preliminary findings . .

    Take one 320 kbps MP3 > drag it into Gamesalad - and Gamesalad makes a 128 kbps m4a
    Take one 64 kbps MP3 > drag it into Gamesalad - and Gamesalad makes a 128 kbps m4a


    So, from what I can see, bouncing a file off at 64 kbps simply throws away data that Gamesalad has to make up (presumably through interpolation).

    I'll try and check it out in more detail tonight.
  • MarkOnTheIronMarkOnTheIron Member Posts: 1,447
    I use m4a for music and ogg for sounds. I use Audacity to convert them. As settings I usually use 22khz and mono for both and 128kbps for the m4a files.

    With this settings a 6 minutes long track encoded at 320 kbps that was 15.5 MB went to only 1.8 MB.


    ________________________________
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  • CloudsClouds Member Posts: 1,599
    edited December 2011
    Here's what I found . . .

    (This only refers to 'music' - rather than 'sounds').

    When you import M4a files Gamesalad does no conversion - it simply copies the original source file - so if you have a 320kbps M4a it will be imported as a 320kbps M4a, or if you have a 64kbps M4a it will be imported as a 64kbps M4a.

    When you import anything else (AIFFs, WAVs, MP3s etc etc) it all gets converted to a 128kbps M4a. So if you are using an MP3 as your source file there is no point dropping the quality below 128kbps as the file size will not be an smaller but the quality will be worse.

    Guide > http://img641.imageshack.us/img641/3439/tablesj.jpg

    .
  • thumbfrenzylabzthumbfrenzylabz Member, PRO Posts: 50
    Based on the advice in this forum, I downloaded Audacity and installed it. I found it cumbersome and not user-friendly at all. For instance, I finally got my sound file trimmed just right so it would loop (btw, the Audacity loop-play function won't work unless you listen to the whole track) and then I tried to export the file as .m4a only to be told I had to install some sort of FFMpeg in Preferences-->Libraries. Once there, it wanted me to download and install Lame_v3.99....exe on my computer. I reluctantly did that (hopefully no viruses hitched a ride) and then I was unable to manually find the file it wanted... so i'm STILL out of luck for exporting .m4a files from Audacity. I mean, if this is a requirement to export Audacity then why isn't it already built into the software? Why do I have to go and download a seperate .exe file myself and then find some random file and install it...

    Sorry for the misplaced rant (this isn't Audacity forums afterall) but GRRR.. am I right in thinking this is how game dev goes guys? Lots of dead ends LOL But somehow its still fun :D

    WOOT :D
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