I have a project where I’m using FMOD. I have two types of sound in the project (Actually two different channel groups) which are music and effects.
I’ve done a lot of research on which formats are the best to choose and came up with the conclusion that using mp3 for music and ADPCM encoded for effects would be the most optimized choice. (Please correct me if you have other ideas).
I also found out that using sound banks is much faster in terms of loading and playing back. I know how to use FMOD Sound Bank Generator now. I have 20 different sound files with different formats (e.g mp3 and wav) that I’m gonna import into the sound bank. My question is if I choose the encoding type to mp3 does FMOD compress all the file formats to mp3? What happens to the mp3 files themselves? Is there a restriction on the input sound formats and the number of sound files I can put in the bank?
I read in a forum that its better to choose lossless audio formats like wav as inputs to avoid having double compression applied on the audio file. But the problem is I can’t force the user to only provide .wav or .flac files but I should write the code in a way that it supports a few more audio formats. I know that having applying a compression technique on top of another is not a good idea in terms of signal processing aspects. Any idea how I should manage this?
Any help would be appreciated.
The best options for mobile or low-spec devices is Vorbis for music and FADPCM for effects.
You’ll need to do two separate banks if you want to support both formats.
There’s no restriction on the number of sounds that can be in a bank.
Our Sound Bank tools can accept any format our runtime can playback. But you’ve already identified that giving it compressed formats will result in decompressions/recompression and signal degradation. There’s no concept of simply re-packing pre-compressed files, it’s infeasible for reasons I won’t go into here.
Thank you Nicholas for your answer.
What I understood then is that importing an already compressed file to the bank and choosing a different compression technique will cause signal degradation and undesirable.
But in the project, the user is importing sound files from a variety of formats, I was thinking of feeding them all to the bank and choose one compression technique (such as MP3) but it seems that this is not a good idea.
Do you have any idea how to manage this? Thank you so much.
Our target audience is professional game sound designers. It’s assumed they know to record and edit in high quality uncompressed and only compress at the final step.