Well, since the search button is down I gotta ask here. What is the best formatting of wavs for use in maps, lowering of size of the map is most important next is quality of instrumental, then of voice. Please share your knownledge .

You've got your priorities mixed up. It's a balance between quality and size. I use audacity for editing my sounds. I cut as much as possible off the front/back. The only real quality options are 8 bit or 16 bit mode (either is fine, 16 bit doubles the size, but SC compresses 16 bit sounds). I consider 8 bit to be of similar quality as 16 bit, so it doesn't matter to me.

The real kicker is the sample rate. Most are at 44100 kHz. Drop that down too 8000 kHz and you will see a massive decrease in size, and it will sound extremely muffled. Make copies of the wav file at each sample rate, see which one you can live with for its size. Obviously, the worst quality is the smallest, but I'm taking really bad quality here.

Always use 16 bit when working with SC, as is ends up compressing it smaller than 8 bit, even if the file was bigger, use mono, because SC ignores stereo, so it's just a waste of space, and you can change the kHz depending on the quality you want.

ya i was looking for advice more along the line of falkoners, i know how to compress and edit audio as i used to remix and compose, just didnt know how starcraft handled 8/16 bit. Just wondering if it had some sweet spot for a khz rating, guess not =P

False. The last in-depth sound compression topic we had we discovered that even though blizzard tells you it compresses the 16bit, it isn't nearly as small as the simpler uncompressed 8 bit. I'll see if I can drag up any of those old topics, though the last one that I remember touching on it was Farty's TinyMap compressor topic.

would using a map compressor reduce that map size of maps with sounds/music without reducing quality?

Afaik map compressors don't touch sounds or only as an option.
And if they do, they of course reduce quality.

Generally, even fully compressed music is just too big for battle net games, and for DLed games, you may as well just make it as big as needed. As such, for bnet ones, I've found that it's best to find something really simple, that can be done with short wav files and death counts (IE, just time sounds with triggers, it will take less space, and you'll be able to pause it at any time, or restart it, etc.)

If you want a good way to do this, use a music composition program and some sheet music, and then use a mathematical process of converting it to DCs based on time and sound.

i already know how to compose so i wouldnt really need to do that O_o... but ya if i put in each note i could do a tracker style beat, but it'd take alot of trigger space. i'd probably just compose an easily compressable loopable song if i was to, i dont think im going to have music in my map anyways, bnet pub maps that are popular must fit the guideline of "really replayable","smallfilesize","Easy to play",usually "hard to master" aswell.

I've tested this before and found the 16 bit ones to be smaller, but perhaps this changes based on the size of the sounds or other variables, I'm betting that the way it's compressed makes it so depending on the sound one works better than the other in some cases, so I guess the best thing to do is to put it into each format, put it into the map, and then save with both and see which is smaller, and use that one.

Anti-false. I personally tested it, and only in rare cases are 8-bit files smaller than maximum compressed 16-bit files.


Take into account that your WAV file might have garbage bytes appended to it.
You can also collapse the WAV header.