The soundtrack files in Freelancer are so incredible small. How did they do that!? I tried several online converter pages and audacity, but when I convert a soundtrack to a .wav file, it's so much bigger than those Freelancer came with.
For example: music_no_lair_battle.wav (the panic inducing theme you know from entering the nomad sectors in the last missions of the main campaign) is 00.47 seconds long and the file is only 467 kb big. When I use converters to make an mp3 to wav, I end up with a file of a size of 10 megabytes per minute. Sonic sez: "Thaaat's no good!"
Does anyone of you know how they got the files so small without loosing the quality? Can anyone recommend me a freeware program or an online tool?
Problem is, I don't have a big harddrive. You know, I want to change most of the system's soundtracks, that would end up with 1-2 gigabytes of wav files. Since I want to avoid that happening, I wanted to ask if someone knows how the hell they did that.
The short .wav files such as gun sounds and the likes are regular .wav files that are uncompressed. Things like the music and other longer stuff are actually compressed.
Converting from .mp3 to .wav is generally a waste of time.
MP3 is a lossy conversion format, which means it will compress a file and you will lose data in the process. A brief explanation of how it works is that it will take an audio file, and simply remove data that exists but won't be picked up by the human ear. You lose quality, but for the most part, you can't hear what's being taken out anyway. It's quite clever. During the conversion process, you can choose how much of the data is removed via the bitrate. Lower bitrates will mean more is removed and so it becomes more possible to tell the difference, higher bitrates maintain more of the data but that also means a larger file size.
WAV files are usually used to just hold everything in an uncompressed manner. They tend to be just a disorganised dump, but contain all the data. Converting from .wav to .mp3 has a purpose, because you're compressing a file, at the expense of quality, to end up with a smaller file size.
If you're actually starting with an .mp3, things have already been taken out out, so making it a .wav won't restore what is lost. You might as well keep the .mp3 as .mp3 if you want to shrink it.
(04-11-2016, 02:27 PM)Mephistoles Wrote: Converting from .mp3 to .wav is generally a waste of time.
MP3 is a lossy conversion format, which means it will compress a file and you will lose data in the process. A brief explanation of how it works is that it will take an audio file, and simply remove data that exists but won't be picked up by the human ear. You lose quality, but for the most part, you can't hear what's being taken out anyway. It's quite clever. During the conversion process, you can choose how much of the data is removed via the bitrate. Lower bitrates will mean more is removed and so it becomes more possible to tell the difference, higher bitrates maintain more of the data but that also means a larger file size.
WAV files are usually used to just hold everything in an uncompressed manner. They tend to be just a disorganised dump, but contain all the data. Converting from .wav to .mp3 has a purpose, because you're compressing a file, at the expense of quality, to end up with a smaller file size.
If you're actually starting with an .mp3, things have already been taken out out, so making it a .wav won't restore what is lost. You might as well keep the .mp3 as .mp3 if you want to shrink it.
Freelancer uses .wav files. That's why I need to convert them.
Very, very important note about Freelancer's music/audio files and file extensions in general: The file extension doesn't necessarily say anything about what kind of file it is. In Freelancer's case, they are not PCM wave files as the .wav file extension would normally suggest, but rather 24kHz sample rate MP3s encoded with the Fraunhofer MP3 codec stored in a file with a .wav extension. There are more details about Freelancer's audio format over in this post.
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