If you have Mb's to spare, use .caf

beefy_clyrobeefy_clyro Member Posts: 5,394
edited November -1 in Working with GS (Mac)
Hi all. I know this has been covered a bit but we have a lot of new members in the community and someone may find this useful.

So the limit to downloading a game from the app store over 3G is 20mb.
If you finish your game and are well under the 20mb limit you may want to consider using .caf for your audio.

I have nearly completed my new game which had the following stats when running during level play;

Project size - 5.9 mb
Images - 12.5 mb
Audio - 25 mb
Game Engine - 13.8 mb
Other - 11.2 mb
Total - 62.6 mb

Now between menu and level it would take up to about 15-20 seconds to load.

Replaced all .ogg files with .caf and these are the results;

Project size - 16 mb
Images - 12.5 mb
Audio - 10 mb
Game Engine - 13.6 mb
Other - 11.1 mb
Total - 47.5 mb

Now between menu and level it would take up to about 4-5 seconds to load.

So if you can afford the extra file size increase, .caf definitely seems better! Now maybe its because i didnt optimise my .ogg files properly, what i did was;

Open them up in Audacity
Split the stereo tracks up
Delete a track to make it mono
Export as Ogg

This gave me the results in the first group set shown above. I then took those .ogg files and converted them to .caf and got the second results set. I used a program called MAX which is a free program to convert the files.

Max can be found here;

http://sbooth.org/Max/#download

Please also note that when converting with MAX you will need to tell it to use .caf and either U-Law or A-Law data formats as thats what Gamesalad see's, you can set this in preferences.

Cheers

Comments

  • JCFordJCFord Member Posts: 785
    @ beefy-cylro just a note in Audacity don't split the stereo and delete a track to make it mono as you will be loosing some of the sound data, in the menu TRACKS > STEREO TO MONO then make sure your sounds are down-sampled to 22Hz TRACKS > RESAMPLE then you can export as OGG's and play around with the compression setting to give you the best result of quality vs size.
  • beefy_clyrobeefy_clyro Member Posts: 5,394
    Lush, thanks dude! I'll bear that in mind for the future as this was the 1st time i felt i needed to use .caf files.
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