more control over sound import quality

pretty please :)

if it's possible and not time consuming, please add a stereo / mono option for import and 64, 32 qualities. in most cases 96kbps which is a minimum, is more than enough to keep the quality sound in most of samples :)

thanks in advance

I belive its not really that hard to save project as project (not as single capx with everything inside) and just replace pregenerated files with ones of your choice. Mass-converting audio files is not hard thing.

BTW, i do support the idea of adding more options to C2 yet i think there is a lot more much more important things to do first.

that is exactly why i wrote "if it's possible and not time consuming" :)

right now mass conversion is the only way, but I think it shouldn't be hard to implement it and it would make things easier after exporting.

thanks for input!

We have 3 encoders involved in the audio import process (FLAC decode, OGG encode, AAC encode) and we can only support the features in common to all of them. Unfortunately since the AAC encoder is only a very simple one built in to Windows 7, we can only support 96 / 128 / 160 / 192 kbps, since the encoder doesn't support any other values. However, it looks like it's straightforward to add a downmix-to-mono option, so I'll see if I can add that.

If you need more advanced options beyond that, I would recommend finding your own encoders. We're not really looking to make C2 a super-advanced audio encoder program.

Actually upon further investigation, our AAC encoder doesn't support downmixing to mono. I'm not sure it's worth adding if it doesn't work with some formats - best to use other software to process your WAVs how you want then import them as mono in advance.

ok, thanks for answers.

cheers!

AFAIK there's no way to obtain an AAC mono file.

But this is not a problem. If you use an external program like audacity you can export mono WAV to a stereo AAC with half bitrate, half size and the same sound quality of a stereo file exported with double bitrate.

(source: audacity manual)

Ashley, dont lay the blame to aac encoder, its possible to use mencoder or even just output batch script and then launch mencoder with it.

There is a lot of free (as freedom, not as beer) codecs even for aac and there is a lot of free encoders that can use em and can be run by bach script.

It may not be as easy as ranma says yet there is nothing impossible. And you dont even need to release C2 under free license (but i hope you will someday) as you can just use external binary to encode everything.

Knifegrinder is right, usually if you encode a mono wav file it will come out half as big as a stereo file anyway, even if the output file is stereo, because the sound data on both channels is the same. So downmixing to mono before importing to C2 should work fine.

Goury - I'm afraid it's still not that simple. Have a look through our blog post archives where we cover it in more detail. Because of patents around AAC, we must pay a license even just to distribute a free encoder. This is why we use Windows 7's built-in encoder - it means we are not distributing an encoder, so we don't need a license. Windows 7's encoder is not very good, but I don't really care - it's only for Internet Explorer and Safari who could support the free Ogg Vorbis format, but don't because they have ulterior motives. So I'm not too bothered if sound quality isn't great in those browsers.

Ashley You are right with the IE and Opera. But on the other hand even in a non sound rich game is possible that 50% of the final size is the audio.

My own example is a simple Memory game, what's full size is 2,582Mb, and the audio in it is 1,432Mb. I used only ogg, cause of the Chrome Webstore publish. But it's 55% of the size!

I dont want to push to give this feature a No1. priority, but just keep in your list, keep your eyes open if a solution is accessable...

Knifegrinder is right, usually if you encode a mono wav file it will come out half as big as a stereo file anyway, even if the output file is stereo, because the sound data on both channels is the same. So downmixing to mono before importing to C2 should work fine.

how? 96 kbps is still 96kbps, mono file is not shorter in half. so mono file is same size, just twice as good in quality. hence 96kbps stereo is actually 48kbps per channel, mono is 96 kbps per channel, but still 8 second file encoded with 96kbps quality should weigh 96KB despite being mono right?

ranma - well, I mean if you have a stereo track and encode it both before and after downmixing to mono. Most codecs encode stereo as M+S (mid and side) rather than L+R, so in a stereo track with identical L+R channels the side channel is zero and should compress to nothing. Most encoders also use variable bit rate (VBR) so choosing '96 kbps' does not mean it will definitely generate that much data per second, it's just an approximation, and it will be less if the audio is easy to encode. (For example silence won't generate 96kbps of data in a VBR encoder, that would be wasteful). A stereo sound would have to add a lot of data to the S channel, making the file up to twice as large (but usually not that much actually).

The Ogg Vorbis files tend to be very small and good quality, whereas the AAC files are a little bit bigger and sound a bit worse. It's not a major difference, only IE+Safari users get those files, and I doubt many casual gamers would actually notice, so I don't think there's any need to change the way we do it. Again, if you want tight control over how your audio files are compressed, mix and encode them before importing to Construct 2 - if you import .ogg and .m4a files, C2 just copies them in to the project without touching them. It will only encode for you if you import .wav or .flac.

if you import .ogg and .m4a files, C2 just copies them in to the project without touching them.

8-O

didn't know that, that's actually grat news and negates my first request :) thanks!