Comments on: Ogg Or Wav?

By: Pete

Pete — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 05:17:04 +0000

Ogg has excellent quality and compression ratio but it has way too much overhead to be useful for sound effects. I can understand ogg for music but that’s about it.

By: Yann

Yann — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:09:14 +0000

Lumooja, you’re wrong: the license is paid by whoever writes the player, encoder, decoder. it’s transparent for you as the end user.

And the original question is way too simplistic. You go and try to play OGGs on the DS while having an actual game running…

By: Lumooja

Lumooja — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 20:50:10 +0000

You can’t really ask OGG or WAV, because OGG is used for distribution and publishing, while WAV is used for raw material and editing.
Of course if someone uses WAV for distribution and publishing, he should be hanged.
MP3 is out of the question, since it kills high frequencies, making all AAA songs sound like crap. Besides, I think every single MP3 on the planet is illegal, since you should pay license fees to Frauenheimer for each self-made, listened, bought, and otherwise handled MP3. Nobody does that, so everyone is a criminal who uses MP3.

By: Fili

Fili — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:01:34 +0000

Well, for mobile devices (like the iPhone), decompressing OGG’s takes too much processor time, compared to WAV’s. So an approach would be to include ogg in the package for the small size, but uncompress them at load-time (just once) so that you can play them faster…

By: Ovogame

Ovogame — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:17:22 +0000

Loading a file from HD take ages compare to uncompressing it in memory. Small ogg files will be loaded and uncompressed faster than the wav equivalent is loaded. If your sample is too big, you should stream it. There is no obvious reason too keep wav & ogg. Ogg wins in all areas, I’m puzzled that still 20% use wavs. My latest game have close from 900 ogg files, no way, I can afford to not compress even the tiny files.

By: Christian

Christian — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:33:39 +0000

Although I prefer ogg’s, too, sometimes it is worthwile to stick to wav for soundeffects. Even if ogg’s are compressed – if your engine has to decompress it to play them, wav’s are loaded faster than ogg’s and are than sometimes preferrable.

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:03:45 +0000

For music and big sound effects, ogg. Sometimes for small sound effects I’ve been making I leave them as wav as it’s not even worth converting them.

By: Shadhex

Shadhex — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 16:59:13 +0000

Seems like caff is my sound format of choice these days. At work, we use ogg.

By: Russell

Russell — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 15:55:27 +0000

Why would anyone choose an uncompressed format?

By: Toni Mäkinen

Toni Mäkinen — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:14:27 +0000

MP3 has licensing issues. Patents et all… OGG does not have that problem.