.wav vs. .ogg

[Leander]

What is the disadvantage of an .ogg-file? Oggs are great for background music while I've always used .wav for samples, e.g. ball hits wall, player collects fruit etc.

My .exe is 17 MB because of a high number of samples. I could replace these .wav-files with .ogg-files but would this decrease the sound quality?

What are the downsides of oggs?

[Stephen]

Ogg is the best format. You don't lose sound quality, and the filesize is smaller.

stephen1980

[Jaffob]

Stephen is right, OGGs are much better than WAVs. My project was taking forever to load because of a big WAV file (about 21MB). So I used Audacity to convert it to OGG and now it's less than 3MB.

[Leander]

Alright then. My samples are between 5 and 100kb, only some of them are up to 300 but the large number of them makes the .exe so big.

I use Audacity as well.

[Sphax]

I use OGG for all my samples and music: the final file size will be smaller than using WAV without losing quality.

[Pkeod]

We use OGG for samples and music as well. It's jawesome!

Most of the OGG files we use are converted to 96 Kbps 44,100 Hz. And depending on if the sample is mono or stereo we use both. For some voice stuff we may use a higher rate, but what we use for most things is still very good for games.

[stuckboy]

Hmmm I was wondering actually- do Ogg files cause a significantly higher load on the processor though? They require audio decompression so they should be more heavy on the CPU, I just want to know (from someone who does know or can make an decent estimate) if it would have a significant impact if say all 32 channels were playing oggs simultaneously?

If it doesnt hurt the processor, I think I'll convert all my samples to ogg too. The audio in my game is about 90% of its filesize at the moment.