What are you experiences with the best format for soundeffects?
From my experience: 16-bit .wav files with a 22K sampling rate for sound effects, and .mp3 for background music.
I imagine opinions will vary, however.
I go even lower than that with the sampling rate for sound effects (16k usually), and AAC sounds better than MP3 for music, particularly at lower bitrates.
–Eric
I really haven’t experimented much with this. Does Unity have no problem dealing with a bunch of files of mixed sample rates?
It certainly does.
Not in my case, but I’m using one rate for sound effects and another for music, and the music is handled by the hardware, so that probably doesn’t count. I’ve used different rates for sounds in regular Unity projects without issues, so that probably also works in Unity iPhone, but I don’t know for sure.
–Eric
I just found this hilarious website a couple days ago, which can help you pick out a sample rate:
At 26, I’m able to hear the highest frequency, but I really need to boost the hell out of it. :x
There’s a noticeable rolloff point in my own hearing, around 15-16 kHz. The rule is that you need to have twice the frequency you want to sample. So for me, using anything above 32 kHz is going to have diminishing returns.
However, you ought to plan for you target audience, in accordance with your clips. Little kids will have the best hearing, but probably won’t care much about quality. If you’re aiming at teenagers, though, you may want to bump it up a little higher than you would for yourself. Just don’t get the idea that your perception of quality is equivalent to someone else’s. Err on the “too much” side if it won’t affect performance of the game, which of course is paramount.
I run an analyser to see if there’s anything worth keeping at any given frequency. For example, an explosion will rarely have anything worth keeping above 10khz in tone, so I’ll round it to 22khz (22khz playback = half of that maximum pitch)
Unless i can get away with less, I personally use 32khz, rarely stereo (except unless i specifically require spacial sound).
You need to remember that a 128kbit encoded mp3 rolls off basically anything over 16khz anyway, and in fact, even Dolby in fact has fairly tight rolloffs on both bass and treble.
Don’t rely on this. The lower the birate, the more random spikes of high frequency noise you may get.
Nice reference. Sound is hard, too much things to learn and many equations need math knowledge. No king’s road to Euclidean elements, no king’s road to sound either. What intrigues me is the validity of the old researches versus the new. It seems that 50 years ago people really did research.