Post by Stephan Sokolow in FREE Music Pack 2: Piano comments

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If you’re offering Wave files because of the quality, have you considered offering FLAC instead?

On average, you’ll get at least 50% compression out of it
It’s the most popular compressed lossless format
The encoder bakes an MD5 hash of the original PCM audio into the FLAC file that allows a decoder (eg. flac -t) to verify that the encoded data produces output bit-for-bit identical with the original audio.
The flac encoder has a --verify option which will double-check the correctness of the MD5 hash as the output file is being generated by decompressing the freshly compressed data in parallel.

Hi, you have good points about FLAC benefits over wav but very few game engines support it and the wav is mostly there for library/listening purposes. Really, everyone should be using the ogg versions because the quality is almost indistinguishable.

Stephan Sokolow3 years ago (1 edit)

Wouldn’t those be points in favour of using FLAC?

If the Wave is mostly there for library/listening purposes, FLAC is better suited to archival (size and checksumming) and media players are much more likely to support it than game engines.
If Ogg is recommended for game engines, wouldn’t offering FLAC instead of Wave provide a subtle incentive to use Ogg instead of trying to bundle Wave files into your game?

itch.io

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