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Re: More Soundtrack



On Friday 05 March 2004 05:02 am, Dave Fancella wrote:

Ok, here's the link to the ogg.  If you downloaded it earlier today, it's 
grown quite a bit since I posted that link.

http://www.davefancella.com/defaulttest.ogg

There's some clipping later on in the ogg file.  Sorry about that.  What do 
you expect from a raw dump?

Anyway, attached is the midi file.  I play it in Timidity++ and it sounds just 
like the ogg (only without the clipping, not sure how that got in there, 
really).  I'm curious for others to compare the two files and see how 
different they sound from one place to another, specifically from the ogg 
file to the Hello, World! sound player that's bundled with SDL_mixer.

So now comes the question.  :)  If I make an ogg file, we're looking at 
probably 2-3 times the size of this one I just posted.  When you pack that 
into a tarball for distribution with the game it doesn't compress much.  In 
fact, it may get bigger when it's tarred and gzipped.  So, to keep the 
initial download as short as possible, that means we'd only be able to 
include one soundtrack, maybe two if I work it just right (halve the sampling 
rate, encode at a lower quality setting).  The main advantage, musically, is 
that I could stick guitar lines and other sweet noises by doing a fair amount 
of post-production work on it.  The main disadvantage is that we'll be 
looking at the size of the core distribution pretty much immediately and 
worrying that it might be getting too big.  (and also incur a vorbis 
dependency if there isn't already one there.  Midi in SDL_mixer is 
self-contained and won't incur an additional dependency)

On the other hand, if we leave it as a midi file, we have to distribute the 
GUS sample set that SDL_mixer depends on to play the midi file, and we have 
to distribute it with the core distribution (and I have to switch out a 
couple of percussion samples that don't have commercial distribution rights.  
Someone may distribute crimson commercially, and I've got better samples 
anyway).  That's 14MB.  Luckily, I can trim it down to about 1.4 MB that 
should compress nicely in the tarball to about 1MB.  Actual midi files are 
pretty small and rarely get real big, so we'd be able to stick a *lot* of 
midi files in there and have lots of music.  In fact, if we allocate 5MB for 
the soundtrack (almost a necessity for an ogg soundtrack), that would leave 
us with about 3.9 MB left for midi files, or somewhere around 39 midi files, 
roughly 3.25 hours of music (note: I used the compressed number for the GUS 
set, but decompressed numbers for midi files.  There could easily be 7+ hours 
in 3.9MB worth of tarball, midis compress like plaintext files).  The main 
advantage to this is being able to have a more time on the soundtrack, with 
the loss of the added studio work (my living room shouldn't ordinarily be 
mistaken for a studio).

So it's the old quality vs quantity debate.  The midi file I've given should 
demonstrate the quality, keeping in mind that with more tweaking I can 
probably get it to sound waaaaay better than it does now.  Also, the tweaking 
I suggested to get the ogg file even smaller may reduce it in quality to 
where it'd be equal or less than the quality of the midi file.

Dave

> The sound quality isn't quite perfect, I've got a lot of work to do to get
> it just right.  Also, the last 40 seconds are just the synth riff and a
> little rock beat, so after you hear it once you don't really have to listen
> to the rest, unless you really want to.
>
> Some questions:  (Well, one question)
>
> First, what sort of support does SDL have for midi?  Here's what I found:
> http://www.libsdl.org/projects/SDL_mixer/
> http://icculus.org/SDL_sound/
>
> Of the two, SDL_mixer is definitely bundled with Mandrake 9.2, I don't know
> about any other distributions.  Apparently Gentoo has SDL_sound, according
> to the webpage.  I'll look later and see if Mandrake has it.  I ask because
> I could certainly do midi-only music for the default soundtrack that comes
> with the game and then do an enhanced version using guitars and other
> things that don't suck available as a large and separate download.
>
> Dave

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Attachment: defaulttest.mid
Description: MIDI audio