Sound quality issues in BYOND Discussion

ID:136463
 
Oct 7 2002, 6:43 am
I've noticed that BYOND greatly reduces the quality of .wav files on playback, and was wondering if this was a known issue, and if it was being looked at for the coming upgrade.

I have made a cool little intro signature sound for my games, and reduced it to 11khz 16-bit stereo. It was still a bigger file than I wanted it to be, but it sounded so darned nice. But then when I played it back in-game, not only was the quality much, much lower (8-bit, 8khz?), but it actually played back in mono.

If I knew the exact sample rate and bit depth limitations, I could at least optimize my sound for that, and save a lot of file size overhead to boot. Of course I would prefer it just play back waves as they are, but I'll play with what I got, as long as I know the rules.
#1 Oct 7 2002, 8:07 am
Skysaw wrote:
I've noticed that BYOND greatly reduces the quality of .wav files on playback, and was wondering if this was a known issue, and if it was being looked at for the coming upgrade.

I have made a cool little intro signature sound for my games, and reduced it to 11khz 16-bit stereo. It was still a bigger file than I wanted it to be, but it sounded so darned nice. But then when I played it back in-game, not only was the quality much, much lower (8-bit, 8khz?), but it actually played back in mono.

If I knew the exact sample rate and bit depth limitations, I could at least optimize my sound for that, and save a lot of file size overhead to boot. Of course I would prefer it just play back waves as they are, but I'll play with what I got, as long as I know the rules.

Dantom discussed this recently in another thread on this forum. Apparently they're not happy with wavemix.dll's performance in this matter, nor are a lot of authors, so they're looking into what they can do about replacing the sound library with something better--hopefully something with MOD support.

I've noticed in Scream of the Stickster that the sound quality goes way down too; only one or two of the wavs have a slight hiss to them that's been impossible to remove (even with the best tools available), but they all play back with quite a bit of hiss. The loud versions of the monster roars should be hiss-free, since they're professionally recorded sound effects (bought and paid for) that have been edited down to extract a single roar from the main wav, and amplified. (Correction: I actually do notice a slight hiss on two of those, which I think comes from reducing them to 22KHz.) The quieter versions have had an echo applied, but shouldn't sound hissy either; I've gone through all of those and they're just fine.

Lummox JR
#2 Oct 7 2002, 8:59 am
In response to Lummox JR (#1)
Dantom discussed this recently in another thread on this forum. Apparently they're not happy with wavemix.dll's performance in this matter, nor are a lot of authors, so they're looking into what they can do about replacing the sound library with something better--hopefully something with MOD support.

MOD support would be fine, but I hope that won't mean no better support for wavs and/or none for mp3. I still think mp3 would be the best for sound effects, being the best file size to quality ratio.

I've noticed in Scream of the Stickster that the sound quality goes way down too; only one or two of the wavs have a slight hiss to them that's been impossible to remove (even with the best tools available), but they all play back with quite a bit of hiss. The loud versions of the monster roars should be hiss-free, since they're professionally recorded sound effects (bought and paid for) that have been edited down to extract a single roar from the main wav, and amplified. (Correction: I actually do notice a slight hiss on two of those, which I think comes from reducing them to 22KHz.) The quieter versions have had an echo applied, but shouldn't sound hissy either; I've gone through all of those and they're just fine.

I think more is going on than just reducing to 22khz. I got my file to sound pretty darned good in 22khz, but it still sounded crappy coming through BYOND. I think it's also reducing to 8 bits, and maybe even 11khz, as well as losing stereo image. I'll post an A/B comparison later if you're interested. Reducing sample rate will chop off high frequencies while reducing bit depth will introduce hiss and distortion. There seems to be a combination of that going on.
#3 Oct 7 2002, 10:36 am
In response to Skysaw (#2)
I think more is going on than just reducing to 22khz. I got my file to sound pretty darned good in 22khz, but it still sounded crappy coming through BYOND. I think it's also reducing to 8 bits, and maybe even 11khz, as well as losing stereo image. I'll post an A/B comparison later if you're interested. Reducing sample rate will chop off high frequencies while reducing bit depth will introduce hiss and distortion. There seems to be a combination of that going on.

In my case it wasn't just a loss of quality -- that, I could live with. The sounds were actually playing back at a lower pitch!
#4 Oct 7 2002, 10:43 am
In response to Lummox JR (#1)
Lummox JR wrote:
Dantom discussed this recently in another thread on this forum. Apparently they're not happy with wavemix.dll's performance in this matter, nor are a lot of authors, so they're looking into what they can do about replacing the sound library with something better--hopefully something with MOD support.

A little birdie told me this may be in the next release. Hopefully. Barring unforseen complications.
#5 Oct 9 2002, 6:07 pm
In response to Air Mapster (#4)
Oh, you golf too?