Hey people, so I was wondering the best way to compress some .wavs that I have, they're making my map huge. I was told by someone to use windows movie maker to compress the .wav, which seemed to work, although when I converted the .wma format from windows movie maker back into a .wav, the file was even bigger than to begin with. I'll attach the map with the .wavs in question. I would appreciate a good program for this and maybe some insight as to what I am doing wrong.

EDIT: I suppose I should mention that I was using http://www.zamzar.com/ to convert from .wma to .wav, and I suppose that is where the problem lies, because windows movie maker appears to be compressing the .wavs into a much smaller .wma, and then zamzar.com converts the .wma into a .wav much bigger than the original

Attachments:

Pft, tiny map.
http://www.blazemp.com/compress_wav_files.htm
Try this software. See what the compression ratio is. Assuming SCMDraft's compression ratios aren't up to snuff, this should solve your problems.

(Note that when I say "Wav compression," I mean reducing the quality of the file to make it smaller. You can't achieve lossless compression with Wavs.)

TinyMap2 does wav compression for you, so you can always just compress your map with that when you're ready to release it. For that particular map, it compressed it to 552kb.

Remember that the built-in compression for 16-bit sound files will buy you a lot more than if you compress the sound to 8-bit. Even though an 8-bit file will be smaller than a 16-bit file, the 16-bit will compress into the MPQ at a much smaller size, whereas the 8-bit file won't compress at all. (I think TinyMap2 will change an 8-bit sound file to a 16-bit one to take advantage of the compression.)

As for an actual program to compress wavs, I've always just used Sound Recorder (look on your computer for sndrec32.exe; it should be there by default if you have a Windows OS). On there, just go to File -> Properties -> Convert Now and select the appropriate quality. I'm usually happy enough with 11.025 kHz 16-Bit Mono, but you can choose a lower frequency for a smaller size or a higher frequency for better quality.


Aww yeah.

EDIT: If you can't find sndrec32.exe on your machine for whatever reason, you can get it here.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jun 25 2012, 2:48 am by Roy.

Pretty sure that sound recorder in Windows Vista and 7 is gimped and doesn't support this sort of thing any more.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/9995-sound-recorder-open-use.html

At work on Linux so can't check.

I ended up getting some sound editor program which I can't remember the name of that did a very good job of reducing wave file size without destroying the quality much at all. As in I was able to get the files some 30-50% smaller than the other programs I tried, including blazemp, without much loss of quality. Will post the name when I get home.

I've always used Wavepad sound editor. Let's you choose from lots of different options such as bit-rate, Hz, and stereo/mono.

Okay, thanks for the info guys.

Maybe this deserves its own topic, but I used tinymap2 to compress my map, which it did just fine, although NOW my map starts to get laggy after about five minutes of playing. This is not my internet connection or people I am playing with, the map just starts to build up an unbearable amount of lag. This did not happen before I compressed it. Any ideas?

P.S. I have windows sound recorder on vista, which does not have compression options.

That's not the sound recorder I'm talking about. I specifically mentioned sndrec32.exe (and even had an image in my post for it), which is included for Windows Vista and Windows 7 (Well, maybe not Vista; I never had Vista). You just have to search for "sndrec32.exe" rather than the new "Sound Recorder."

[quote-name:Leeroy_Jenkins]Maybe this deserves its own topic, but I used tinymap2 to compress my map, which it did just fine, although NOW my map starts to get laggy after about five minutes of playing. This is not my internet connection or people I am playing with, the map just starts to build up an unbearable amount of lag. This did not happen before I compressed it. Any ideas?[/quote]
It could be that TinyMap2 removed something that caused some sort of memory leak.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 25 2012, 2:46 am by Roy.

I recommend using Audacity.

*EDIT*

When your game is lagging are sounds being played a lot? Audio can have a nasty effect on lagging games.

Alright well as far as compressing .WAVs goes, I got the answers I needed. Thanks guys.

Audacity is the name of the program I used that I mentioned above. Gave me the best quality/size reduction of all of the options I tried, but it did take a bit of fiddling to get there. Best of all it's open source and free: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/