Compression

Anyone have a good audio compression program or trick? I tried compressing a 184 KB 32 kb/s sound file and I got it down to 90 but it sounded like shit :(.

I just use the MS Sound Recorder from Windows and play with the compression.

I was hoping there was some program that could reduce it a little bit but still preserve most of the quality. The windows one shittized it.

it can be done, look at the UT sounds, they start at like 60kb a piece, and I have them in my map at about 7kb a piece, and they sound great, ask Jimpy, he may know

Good Call!

Found a solution? If so do tell!

The Jimpster is not online too much. I'll post here once I get the solution.

The Jimpy says he can't do it and doesn't know how. His guess on the UT files was either they were uncompressed to start off with, or they used a godly program.

The file I wanted compressed was already compressed down to 32 kb/s apparently.

Nero Wave Editor? Adobe Audition?...

I don't have either of these programs. If you guys don't mind, I will post the mp3 file and it would be much appreciated if one of you guys could work on it.

It currently runs at 32 kb/s and takes up I believe 184 kb. It is 45 seconds long.

I used the windows compressor and it says "appears to not be a valid sound file" any idea why that is happening?

Right, here's my advice, but bare in mind there is no subsitute for just biting the bullet and having a larger sound file. For a start, you could probably cut it down to about 15 seconds and get it to loop, no need for a wopping great 45 second clip. Secondly, it's a stereo file, switch it to mono. There's no difference between the two fields if you look at the waveform, so it's basically just wasting space. Half the fields, half the file size, savvy?

As for the kb/s, leave it at 32, any lower and it will start sounding crap, unless you do a load of high and low end filters over it to stop the artifacting being so noticable, but that's really unadvisable cos it just reduces the quality of your sound anyway.

1) find 10-15 seconds worth of the file that you wanna loop
2) convert it to mono

How to compress sounds to take as little space as possible for war3:

Step 1. Make sure the original sound is as good quality as possible, otherwise it will not yield good results.

Step 2. Download lamedrop and convert to mp3 http://www.rarewares.org/dancer/dancer.php?f=38 using CBR (Constant Bitrate Settings), lowering the quality until you find the smallest value that sounds acceptible to you.

Lame is the best encoder for mp3 there is, so following these steps will give you the best results possible. And use Mono encoding, you don't need stereo sounds.

My opinion...

For a great music compression:
44100, Stereo, 16-bits (48000 will do better, but not sure if the music work in wc3)

For a good sound compression:
22050, Mono, 16-bit (8-bit if you want the sounds to become a little smaller than the 16)

For a very small compression (low quality and, in some sound-cards, noisy):
11025, Mono, 16-bit (or 8-bit)

If you are gonna use the sounds in Warcraft, save them as mp3 (wav will do for short sounds).

Good sound editing software (can also change compression):
Adobe Audition 1.5 (best, but cost a lot of money)
Audacity (good and free, doesn't cost a thing)

Thanks for all the advice guys! The idea to make it Mono is a great idea, or so I thought.

I made it mono and filesize actually increased by 1 kb, did I do something wrong? Checked rate it was still at 32..

Meh I was able to cut it down 60 kb by removing 15 seconds of uselessness!