Re: Default Sounds

[Stef Bidi]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 9:18 AM, David Chisnall <theraven@sucs.org> wrote:

On 30 Jul 2009, at 14:19, Gregory Casamento wrote:

Which format would be best?

Anything that the new NSSound code supports.  Since they only need to be a couple of seconds long, we can probably distribute them as uncompressed sounds, I'd suggest 16-bit either mono or stereo depending on the sound (the 'whooosh' sound Apple provides makes good use of stereo, flying from one side to the other, but others are essentially mono).

 

I would recommnd 16-bit PCM WAV format (any sample rate is fine).  I have backup code that can read WAV and AU/SND files without requiring and libraries.  I plan on implementing them on the GSSoundSource protocol after the NSSound changes are in.  This would allow reading sound even without libsndfile... libao would still be required for playback, but the plan is to deprecate that in favor of native ALSA, OSS and WINMM.

 

AU/SND format would be fine, too.

 

Apple provides theirs as 16-bit Integer (Big Endian - even on x86, marginally interestingly), Stereo, 44.100 kHz .aiff files.  The total file size for all of the sounds is under 1MB.  Someone shipping a handheld platform where space was at a very tight premium could encode them as something like vorbis if the sound input bundle supported this format to save some space.

 

AIFF/AIFC sound is a pain to read because of the 80-bit float.  Not saying it's not possible, just painful.