Re: distributing high quality audio
2015-10-19
Thread
AudioGames . net Forum — Off-topic room : themadviolinist via Audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio So here's the short answer. Do what is necessary for the recording in question.Here's the expansion on the short answer. It depends entirely upon what you want the recording to convey. If the sort of detail you want to highlight is something that compression kills, don't compress. If not, then find the level at which said detail becomes muddy and stay above that floor.As someone who keeps his music collection in .flac, I go for larger, better quality, but when recording and distributing simple interviews, I'd compress the hell out of them for band width/storage considerations. It's the difference between the Diane Rehm show, where all you need is clear voice audio and something like Radio Lab, where audio production is actually a part of the experience.Your .flac option and compressed file is likely the best alternative. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235392#p235392 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio this one I'm using is edited by somebody else, and it is very accessible.I don't use it for single tracks only. I also use It for little mixes. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235314#p235314 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio Cool Edit is really, really old, it hasn't been updated since 2002 I believe, though I could be wrong. Still, it wasn't meant for anything higher than XP. I did get it to work on Win 7 64 bit surprisingly, though some of the plug-ins it ocmes with are more unstable. Still for basic stuff it still works pretty well. I mainly use it for single track editing, so I can't omment on its accessibility as a DAW. I wouldn't expect much, though. But for single track editing, it does have some good things to be said about it. It was eventually bought out by Adobe Audition, and ever since 1.5, it's gotten increasingly less accessible. Right now I believe they're on version 6 or 7, I honestly stopped keeping track as accessibility basically went through the tubes a long, long time ago. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235302#p235302 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio Hi, there was the talking about cool edid pro in this topicIf I remember right, someone said that it was inaccessible.Did they release an update to the current version?Greetings Moritz. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235274#p235274 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio The preset I'm talking about can be found by going to effects> equaliser and press enter on gentle high boost. There are also two other effects called Shimmer vox and simple high lift. Don't forget audacity, there's the bass and trouble. increase the percentage and I think it will clear the sound a little. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235258#p235258 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio I do have a copy of Cool Edit, not sure what preset you're referring to though.So it seems that most people when downloading stuff are going to the standard mp3, which I suspected to be the case. And while the preference for quality loss is obviously different for everyone, the trend I'm starting to see is that people aren't concerned about saving every byte of space since there's so much of it. I.e. I don't have to crunch down the bit rate because most people are used to downloading at higher bit rates, and so switching to another format like ogg for example may not be necessary since mp3 is good enough for virtually everyone in this thread so far. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235257#p235257 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio Hello.To be quite honest, all my music is in 1192 kbps, which is enough for me.But you gave me the idea to take an audio file and convert it in to different bitrates, up to 320 kbps and see what the difference will be.Greetings Moritz. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235244#p235244 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio Hello all. It depends prety much on the role of said recording. If it is a song to enjoy or something for personal use, I mostly care for quality over quantity. But as a aspiring audiogames sound designer, I know it is hard to maintain a high quality for the sound effects for many reasons. It takes time, work and many times money, and as it was said before in this topic, not everyone is going to cheer your for a nice sound editing when there are lots of sounds playing at the same time, and clearly not everyone has the same hearing accurate when it comes to details. So yes. I prefer high quality personally.Best regards, Haramir. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235234#p235234 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio May I know what kind of recording device are you using?For fun and other purposes I use my android device with a recorder from Sony which records in a very high quality and obviously the file size is big. I recorded a file which was about 45 minutes, and it went 250 MB. Pretty much indeed but I never cared about the space my recordings and musics took up. I think 192 KB per second is enough for people who just want to listen to a recording, but I never, never use it. Every downloaded songs is at 320 KB PS. To further clean up a file I use an old program called Cool edit pro, if you have ever heard about it. It has an option from within the presets to enhance the quality. I think the file size doesn't change. But to get it we might have to work through emails since I do not own a legal copy of it. If you are interested in it, you can send me an email at any time. I will explain you how to work with it. It's the best program (from the accessible ones) for mixing and editing music.Cheers. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235215#p235215 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio Hi Nocturnus,Thank you for your input, your posts always give me profound insights into the topic and I find them very enjoyable to read. First I'll respond to your points.While I am well aware of bit depths and sample rates, the standard 16 bit, 44100 HZ is so standardized and done behind the scenes now that imho it's a moot point to start debating about that. Yes I make 24/96 recordings but only for specific reasons i.e. expanded dynamic range and ultrasonic highs which can then be brought back into human hearing range when slowed down, for sound design purposes. But for the stuff I would be posting here and most places, I find 16 bit 44 K to be acceptable, so yes, as you clearly outline, that would be 1411200 bytes per second, or just over 10 mb/minute. Most people would not be willing to download that, when as you said an mp3 at 128 K affectively sounds good to most people and reduces the download by 90 percent.So let's say I have an hour long recording I want to share. As 16 bit, 44100 HZ sample rate, that would be roughly 650 MB. If I were to compress to Flac, that would go down to roughly 300 and would leave the quality untouched. People like me who would appreciate the higher quality would likely be willing to download that, but people who don't care would be inconvenienced. So that's where the real fun starts. At MP3 128, that hour long file would go down to about 60 megs but the quality begins to degrade, still most people won't care, and as I said in my first post, some people have told me that 64 is fine. If everyone else actually thinks that, I have no problem doing it that way, since the files are small, but I'm not sure how extreme I need to go here.Right now I use mp3 at a variable bit rate which sticks around 170 k, which I find is acceptable but not perfect, so that is what I've been doing. But I don't want to be accused of using old technology, when perhaps many people co uld play ogg or whatever format and get a smaller file that sounds just as good as the mp3 did. Most music services from what I heard aren't using mp3 anymore, they're using m4a I think. Free stuff gravitates toward ogg, and flac is there for the quality nerds like myself who want it at its best when possible. Many things are also switching to opus, especially streaming things. Apparently all these guys are switching because they think the benefits outweigh the losses.If I had to sum up my question in plain English, for people who don't know about any of this stuff, it would be this: What do you use to play things (for format compatibility), and how much does a noticeable quality degradation bother you? If I get tons of answers like, yeah I just press enter and play it, I don't really care about all that tech stuff so long as it sounds okay. Then the VBR mp3 thing I will likely do since it's the best compromise I've found so far. But if people exp licitly say they want it to be good, or they use some player that supports the better formats, or if on the converse they say they don't want to download large files for whatever reason, then I feel a certain responsibility to adapt. I realize I can't satisfy everyone, and I'm the first to admit that I am really bad about that. More often than not I have gone too far in satisfying as many people as I can and gotten myself in a big fix because I realized too late that I couldn't accommodate them all. I know this topic is quickly turning into yet another of those helpless quests to find the perfect solution that I doubt will ever exist. I created this topic originally to get open discussion so I could get a feel for what most people wanted, but I fear I've just overdone it and should've just left it go and stuck to my original plan of the acceptable mp3s, with an option for flacs for those who want. What I need to learn to do is find the solution that wor ks best, even if it doesn't satisfy everyone, and just stick to it. Ah well, it's still open I guess, and there's always a chance someone will steer me in another direction.Edit: Thanks Key for your input, apparently your preferences are similar to mine just with a bit larger resultant file. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235197#p235197 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio Hi Nocturnus,Thank you for your input, your posts always give me profound insights into the topic and I find them very enjoyable to read. First I'll respond to your points.While I am well aware of bit depths and sample rates, the standard 16 bit, 44100 HZ is so standardized and done behind the scenes now that imho it's a moot point to start debating about that. Yes I make 24/96 recordings but only for specific reasons i.e. expanded dynamic range and ultrasonic highs which can then be brought back into human hearing range when slowed down, for sound design purposes. But for the stuff I would be posting here and most places, I find 16 bit 44 K to be acceptable, so yes, as you clearly outline, that would be 1411200 bytes per second, or just over 10 mb/minute. Most people would not be willing to download that, when as you said an mp3 at 128 K affectively sounds good to most people and reduces the download by 90 percent.So let's say I have an hour long recording I want to share. As 16 bit, 44100 HZ sample rate, that would be roughly 650 MB. If I were to compress to Flac, that would go down to roughly 300 and would leave the quality untouched. People like me who would appreciate the higher quality would likely be willing to download that, but people who don't care would be inconvenienced. So that's where the real fun starts. At MP3 128, that hour long file would go down to about 60 megs but the quality begins to degrade, still most people won't care, and as I said in my first post, some people have told me that 64 is fine. If everyone else actually thinks that, I have no problem doing it that way, since the files are small, but I'm not sure how extreme I need to go here.Right now I use mp3 at a variable bit rate which sticks around 170 k, which I find is acceptable but not perfect, so that is what I've been doing. But I don't want to be accused of using old technology, when perhaps many people co uld play ogg or whatever format and get a smaller file that sounds just as good as the mp3 did. Most music services from what I heard aren't using mp3 anymore, they're using m4a I think. Free stuff gravitates toward ogg, and flac is there for the quality nerds like myself who want it at its best when possible. Many things are also switching to opus, especially streaming things. Apparently all these guys are switching because they think the benefits outweigh the losses.If I had to sum up my question in plain English, for people who don't know about any of this stuff, it would be this: What do you use to play things (for format compatibility), and how much does a noticeable quality degradation bother you? If I get tons of answers like, yeah I just press enter and play it, I don't really care about all that tech stuff so long as it sounds okay. Then the VBR mp3 thing I will likely do since it's the best compromise I've found so far. But if people exp licitly say they want it to be good, or they use some player that supports the better formats, or if on the converse they say they don't want to download large files for whatever reason, then I feel a certain responsibility to adapt. I realize I can't satisfy everyone, and I'm the first to admit that I am really bad about that. More often than not I have gone too far in satisfying as many people as I can and gotten myself in a big fix because I realized too late that I couldn't accommodate them all. I know this topic is quickly turning into yet another of those helpless quests to find the perfect solution that I doubt will ever exist. I created this topic originally to get open discussion so I could get a feel for what most people wanted, but I fear I've just overdone it and should've just left it go and stuck to my original plan of the acceptable mp3s, with an option for flacs for those who want. What I need to learn to do is find the solution that wor ks best, even if it doesn't satisfy everyone, and just stick to it. Ah well, it's still open I guess, and there's always a chance someone will steer me in another direction.Edit: Thanks Key for your input. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235197#p235197 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio Hi Nocturnus,Thank you for your input, your posts always give me profound insights into the topic and I find them very enjoyable to read. First I'll respond to your points.While I am well aware of bit depths and sample rates, the standard 16 bit, 44100 HZ is so standardized and done behind the scenes now that imho it's a moot point to start debating about that. Yes I make 24/96 recordings but only for specific reasons i.e. expanded dynamic range and ultrasonic highs which can then be brought back into human hearing range when slowed down, for sound design purposes. But for the stuff I would be posting here and most places, I find 16 bit 44 K to be acceptable, so yes, as you clearly outline, that would be 1411200 bytes per second, or just over 10 mb/minute. Most people would not be willing to download that, when as you said an mp3 at 128 K affectively sounds good to most people and reduces the download by 90 percent.So let's say I have an hour long recording I want to share. As 16 bit, 44100 HZ sample rate, that would be roughly 650 MB. If I were to compress to Flac, that would go down to roughly 300 and would leave the quality untouched. People like me who would appreciate the higher quality would likely be willing to download that, but people who don't care would be inconvenienced. So that's where the real fun starts. At MP3 128, that hour long file would go down to about 60 megs but the quality begins to degrade, still most people won't care, and as I said in my first post, some people have told me that 64 is fine. If everyone else actually thinks that, I have no problem doing it that way, since the files are small, but I'm not sure how extreme I need to go here.Right now I use mp3 at a variable bit rate which sticks around 170 k, which I find is acceptable but not perfect, so that is what I've been doing. But I don't want to be accused of using old technology, when perhaps many people co uld play ogg or whatever format and get a smaller file that sounds just as good as the mp3 did. Most music services from what I heard aren't using mp3 anymore, they're using m4a I think. Free stuff gravitates toward ogg, and flac is there for the quality nerds like myself who want it at its best when possible. Many things are also switching to opus, especially streaming things. Apparently all these guys are switching because they think the benefits outweigh the losses.If I had to sum up my question in plain English, for people who don't know about any of this stuff, it would be this: What do you use to play things (for format compatibility), and how much does a noticeable quality degradation bother you? If I get tons of answers like, yeah I just press enter and play it, I don't really care about all that tech stuff so long as it sounds okay. Then the VBR mp3 thing I will likely do since it's the best compromise I've found so far. But if people exp licitly say they want it to be good, or they use some player that supports the better formats, or if on the converse they say they don't want to download large files for whatever reason, then I feel a certain responsibility to adapt. I realize I can't satisfy everyone, and I'm the first to admit that I am really bad about that. More often than not I have gone too far in satisfying as many people as I can and gotten myself in a big fix because I realized too late that I couldn't accommodate them all. I know this topic is quickly turning into yet another of those helpless quests to find the perfect solution that I doubt will ever exist. I created this topic originally to get open discussion so I could get a feel for what most people wanted, but I fear I've just overdone it and should've just left it go and stuck to my original plan of the acceptable mp3s, with an option for flacs for those who want. What I need to learn to do is find the solution that wor ks best, even if it doesn't satisfy everyone, and just stick to it. Ah well, it's still open I guess, and there's always a chance someone will steer me in another direction. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235197#p235197 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio I think that a good compromise is 256 kbps mp3's. They are still far smaller than the equivalent in 16-bit, 44100 kbps wav, which is cd-uality, or 24-bit, 96kbps wav, which is the standard production uality format for sound effect companies. URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235192#p235192 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio @raygrote,You are an audiophile. congratulations, that opens you up to a ton of scrutiny from other audiophiles, usually music enthusiasts and sound designers. If you are willing to take what I would classify sometimes as destructive criticism from such circles and accept that you cannot always be right, I tip my hat off to you; it certainly isn't any easier than people developing audio games in their preferred language, and personally, I believe this topic does belong here.That little idiotic preface out of the way, let us continue. Part of the problem, as you have clearly noted, is the massive amount of file formats available, with mp3 anywhere from 128 to 192, sometimes even 96kbps all seemingly acceptable. You need to understand why this is the way it is, though. If you accept that not every human has 2020 vision, you must also accept that the same holds true for hearing. I imagine that for some people, watching reruns of old tv shows on youtube suffices quite nicely because it's free. Sure, they tell themselves, it might be grainy, but I don't have to pay a dime for it. Others, meanwhile, know that if they want higher quality they must use a service like netflix. It costs money, but it delivers a much more effective stream.In the case of audio, the debate that was once so prominent was digital versus analog. Today, while I still hear a few circles discussing this issue, I mostly tend to get it around older individuals; I'm actually going to leave my personal preferences out of this discussion. Let us just conclude this particular paragraph of sorts by stating that in the case of mainstream consumption as it stands today, digital is probably the more convenient of the two given the myriad of technological devices we have today. Of course, that brings us to how we represent any sound as digital information, period.As you may already be aware, two important contributors exist in the case of an audio file, the bitrate which you made mention of, and the sample rate, which you did not. Both of them are important in audio, because one of them measures volume, not necessarily loudness, while the other measures frequencies. Because you technically cannot hear digital, we require both to create a representation. Because the real world is not confined to digits, audio itself is smooth, unaffected by anything other than the restraints put upon it. It is widely believed that since audio continues onward just as time continues, every sound that has ever been made is still floating around somewhere in the cosmos, a vibration or set of vibrations that will forever go on.Digital representations of audio, however, do not work this way. To represent anything digitally, in fact, we need to break down this sort of continuity and distribute it amongst units or chunks that can be measured. We determine that time is measured in ticks. Everything that happens digitally has to happen within one of these ticks, regardless of how much time it actually represents, because a tick inside a processor is not equivalent to a second or even the 10th of a second in real world continual time. This kind of time is measured in hertz. A machine capable of processing 2ghz per second is processing 2trillion ticks within said second, ticks within which, anything can happen.Of course, we don't want to hog down a machine like a computer which carries out tons of tasks only with audio; it makes no sense. We need to determine just how much of this space and time is really necessary to make as close of a representation of true high definition audio as possible. When we start breaking down audio into chunks in this way, we don't end up with as smooth a signal because we are confining it to measurements called samples. How often we actually perform these measurements makes all the difference in the world as to how the audio actually looks in comparison to its true form and thus, how it sounds, creating the rate of time and measurement we call the sample rate. During each one of these samples, we digitally describe a part of the audio we wish the consumer to obtain.Of course, all of these little samples which for all intents and purposes are like little snapshots of our original sound are nothing without volume; again, I'm not just talking about sound loudness but also the depth of the sound and how we describe it. What do we put all of these little snapshots into at the rate with which we've taken them, and since we need to put them into something that can be digitally measured, what is the number at which it is measured? 1? 100? 1000? 0?if we resort to all we've learned in basic computer classes, we know that every digital number is made of digital bits, 1 or 0. when the CD was first introduced, something really interesting happened to sound; it was sliced so as to compromise for the compactness of the disk. We no longer stored an
Re: distributing high quality audio
Re: distributing high quality audio @raygrote,You are an audiophile. congratulations, that opens you up to a ton of scrutiny from other audiophiles, usually music enthusiasts and sound designers. If you are willing to take what I would classify sometimes as destructive criticism from such circles and accept that you cannot always be right, I tip my hat off to you; it certainly isn't any easier than people developing audio games in their preferred language, and personally, I believe this topic does belong here.That little idiotic preface out of the way, let us continue. Part of the problem, as you have clearly noted, is the massive amount of file formats available, with mp3 anywhere from 128 to 192, sometimes even 96kbps all seemingly acceptable. You need to understand why this is the way it is, though. If you accept that not every human has 2020 vision, you must also accept that the same holds true for hearing. I imagine that for some people, watching reruns of old tv shows on youtube suffices quite nicely because it's free. Sure, they tell themselves, it might be grainy, but I don't have to pay a dime for it. Others, meanwhile, know that if they want higher quality they must use a service like netflix. It costs money, but it delivers a much more effective stream.In the case of audio, the debate that was once so prominent was digital versus analog. Today, while I still hear a few circles discussing this issue, I mostly tend to get it around older individuals; I'm actually going to leave my personal preferences out of this discussion. Let us just conclude this particular paragraph of sorts by stating that in the case of mainstream consumption as it stands today, digital is probably the more convenient of the two given the myriad of technological devices we have today. Of course, that brings us to how we represent any sound as digital information, period.As you may already be aware, two important contributors exist in the case of an audio file, the bitrate which you made mention of, and the sample rate, which you did not. Both of them are important in audio, because one of them measures volume, not necessarily loudness, while the other measures frequencies. Because you technically cannot hear digital, we require both to create a representation. Because the real world is not confined to digits, audio itself is smooth, unaffected by anything other than the restraints put upon it. It is widely believed that since audio continues onward just as time continues, every sound that has ever been made is still floating around somewhere in the cosmos, a vibration or set of vibrations that will forever go on.Digital representations of audio, however, do not work this way. To represent anything digitally, in fact, we need to break down this sort of continuity and distribute it amongst units or chunks that can be measured. We determine that time is measured in ticks. Everything that happens digitally has to happen within one of these ticks, regardless of how much time it actually represents, because a tick inside a processor is not equivalent to a second or even the 10th of a second in real world continual time. This kind of time is measured in hertz. A machine capable of processing 2ghz per second is processing 2trillion ticks within said second, ticks within which, anything can happen.Of course, we don't want to hog down a machine like a computer which carries out tons of tasks only with audio; it makes no sense. We need to determine just how much of this space and time is really necessary to make as close of a representation of true high definition audio as possible. When we start breaking down audio into chunks in this way, we don't end up with as smooth a signal because we are confining it to measurements called samples. How often we actually perform these measurements makes all the difference in the world as to how the audio actually looks in comparison to its true form and thus, how it sounds, creating the rate of time and measurement we call the sample rate. During each one of these samples, we digitally describe a part of the audio we wish the consumer to obtain.Of course, all of these little samples which for all intents and purposes are like little snapshots of our original sound are nothing without volume; again, I'm not just talking about sound loudness but also the depth of the sound and how we describe it. What do we put all of these little snapshots into at the rate with which we've taken them, and since we need to put them into something that can be digitally measured, what is the number at which it is measured? 1? 100? 1000? 0?if we resort to all we've learned in basic computer classes, we know that every digital number is made of digital bits, 1 or 0. when the CD was first introduced, something really interesting happened to sound; it was sliced so as to compromise for the compactness of the disk. We no longer stored an
distributing high quality audio
distributing high quality audio Hi all,This could go in general game discussion, however I have put it here because it doesn't have anything directly to do with gaming. Gaming is just one part of what I am asking about here.So what is this about? Let's say I record a game play, a demonstration of a program or a product, a recording of some event, etc. I could always share a compressed mp3 version at a low-ish bit rate, and only a handful of people would really notice that the quality is not the best. Many people aren't in it for top notch quality sound, they just want to hear the recording, and as long as they can hear it clearly and it doesn't have any outright obnoxious problems, they are fine. However, other people, like myself, will appreciate and enjoy a high quality version when available. I've recorded several things, some of which I haven't posted anywhere yet because I'm still editing them and deciding if I like them enough to keep.Many people are fin e with mp3 at 128 k, which I find obnoxious to listen to, but I don't knock anyone who still does it because that's their choice and there are many valid reasons for doing it. I don't criticize those who do it, unless of course they used to care and suddenly they don't. Lol but that hardly ever happens.The content also matters as well, a simple voice recording doesn't necessarily need to be the best quality in the world, though hypothetically it could be, so long as the listeners were willing to download the bigger file. But a play through of a really good sounding audio game, or a demonstration of a really good keyboard or a nice microphone or whatever, will have higher standards and will get considerably more backlash if its quality is mediocre.So, my questions are this. You don't have to answer them, they're just things to think about. I'm curious about your personal opinions on this.Some people, like me, want all the soun d quality they can get, and are a little let down when a really bad sounding file hits our ears. If I increase the quality, it would also increase the size. Some people will truly appreciate that, but others won't like it as then they'll have a huge download when all they want is to hear the thing, and degradation of quality matters very little to them as long as they get what they were looking for.There are newer formats like m4a, ogg, and opus which can give higher quality in smaller sizes, but many people don't know what these are. MP3 has become more than a format with a technical specification, it's now a word in the general public's language. I've seen people refer to music globally as an mp3, not realizing that it could be in any format under the sun, and fortunately whatever player they're using has the right codecs to play it. So, back to the modern higher quality formats I just mentioned. Are they standardized enough that we can saf ely offer files in those formats and assume that people can play them even though they aren't exactly as standard as mp3? That would certainly keep file sizes down and allow for more quality in a smaller package.Finally, I wonder how many people would really be interested in flac downloads which sound exactly like the original, keeping in mind of course that they could be over 5 times larger than the compressed versions. Theoretically I could offer both a compressed and flac version so people could decide what they wanted.I know that's about 10 tons of information, but since I am such a stickler for the quality of my own stuff, I know I am very biased. I've written this topic to ask what people want. Therefore please be honest and don't feel like I'm judging you. If more people want higher quality I will focus on providing that, but if things are as I expect and most people don't really care, then I won't bother. At present I have decid ed to always offer a compressed version but am still trying to decide on how much degradation most people will find acceptable. I once had a guy tell me that the 64 k mp3s I sent him sounded good enough, but it made me cringe. I've also had others later ask me for flac downloads of 192 k mp3s because they cared so much. I've also decided that I will eventually get flac versions of my stuff in a BT Sync, though that's on the back burner for a while until I get more input on this.I purposefully didn't create a pole because there are so many variables at play, such as file size vs. quality, what format, etc. And quality is a very subjective thing.Any thoughts? URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=235156#p235156 ___ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
