I'd like to get everyone's take on game music for downloadable games.

On at least a few occasions, I've heard that at about 7 megs there is a big drop off in downloads from sites like tucows or download.com.

This raises the question.... would you rather make your file size big and go with OGG or make it small with MIDI when creating music for your game?

You could throw in MOD into the mix too although it seems more and more MOD folks are moveing to MP3/OGG since it a hell of alot easier to make.

A very good question. Use wav files beacuse I dont have the time or inclination to work out MIDI, although wavs are huge and it does massivly inflate my files. Many of my games installers are 70% music files in terms of size which is massivly annoing. I tend to use short wavs which I loop constantly to keep sizes down, but this can annoy the user,
I'd be interested to know peoples experience of MIDI and DirectMusic.

cliffski, since you go the Wav route, defintely use OGG.

It's going to make your file sizes MUCH smaller than WAV and it's free from all the legal entanglments and royalties you have to deal with when using MP3.

You can find it here:
http://www.vorbis.com


Still is a issue about the size though, MIDI is still MUCH smaller than ogg.

I like ogg. It's license free and you can get a compression ratio of 23 to 1 without any real loss. It's really hard to impress me with midi. However, if you are a talented composer and can make a good melody then anything is possible. Anything I've heard in mod usually has a synthy kind of sound and is suitable for that kind of writing. Our demo of Pahraohs' Curse uses ogg. It's under 5MB and yet it carries a rich and dynamic music texture that you just can't duplicate in mod or midi. So, it really depends on your writing style. If you like to do synthy type music, then mod is just fine.

I think I mentioned it earlier but I've just gotten a prerelease working so It's looking like FMOD (http://www.fmod.org) definately will support ogged MODs.

I replaced one .xm with an .oxm and it worked fine. It didn't sound noticably different to me.

XM Size was 201,682 normally (117,884 zipped).

OXM size was 106190 normally (58,630 zipped)

On the whole you seem to get about a 50% reduction in size.

Originally posted by Lerc
XM Size was 201,682 normally (117,884 zipped).

OXM size was 106190 normally (58,630 zipped)

On the whole you seem to get about a 50% reduction in size.
Also, remember that OGG's compression ratios would be directly dependent on the size of the module, the length of the song (in patterns), and # of tracks the composer used. XM's especially are known for having the most verbose track data of all the module types, and OGG only compresses samples, not track data or sample/instrument headers. That's why even after having OGG'd the samples, your song is still much smaller when zipped-- that's because zip can still get about 80% compression ratio on that pattern data.

An XM that uses a much larger sample set would likely sport a much better compression ratio after being OGG'd. I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect a 1 meg XM to be less than 300k as a .oxm, and then be roughly 215k to 250k after being zipped.

I plan to add OGG support to my audio stuff (based on mikmod) in a couple weeks, and I have a composer who likes to make stuff in the 900k - 1.3meg range... so I'm interested to see if my theory is right. :)

- Air
- Hour 13 Studios (http://www.hour13.com)