WAV conversion size problem

Hi guys,

I am now close to completing my game, only left putting the music in. And now I am hit with a problem in an area that I have limited knowledge in.

I've read through the manual and forums that I should import music as a wav file and C2 will convert them into the required files. Many also recommend Audacity, which I just downloaded and try.

The problem now is that when I convert, the files become very big. For example: a 5MB mp3 becomes 37MB when I choose the 16bit PCM version. When I import it to C2 it adds only 2MB to the download according to C2. I tried the GSM wav for mobile but C2 can't convert it to OGG and m4a. I reduced the rate until 16khz (any lower and the size actually increased or it wouldn't work), and I was able to get it down to around 1.6MB. But that is really still quite big for just one music track, especially when I will need to use at least 7 music tracks.

Right now, my entire project stands at 10.2MB, including the sound effects (used the sounds provided by C2), and all my images, which include a few large ones for the slideshow movies. If I don't do anything about the WAV files, it will easily double my total size, which is definitely not good for a mobile game.

Please do assist, I am so close to finally completing my game.

I have sometimes found that sometimes C2 was unable to covert some .wav files to the other formats and I had been forces to do so manually with other software (AVs Audio Editor). Not the fault of C2, but rather do the varying nature of .wav files. I have had the same experiences you've noted above with Audacity. It seems a lot of people use and recommend Audacity, however I've found AVs Audio Editor to be far superior, better for conversion and file size reduction. I've found the best practice is first use C2 to import and covert my wav files. After I use AVs Audio Editor to reduce or compress the final files directly in project's audio folders. I've found when reducing the MHz size of the file the audio often gets corrupted or quality is damaged. AVS Audio Editor does a superior job on all counts. There' plenty of info how to accomplish any action. Just google it!

In addition it will convert any sound into any other type and has number of the great features for creating audio effects that any game developer will appreciate.

Good Luck

TheDom, thank you. I just googled it and am in the process of downloading the audio converter. Will test it out and report my results here later.

— The software looks good as it has lots of options and settings to adjust our file size. One thing though.....the software requires us to buy it, if we use the free version, it leaves an audio watermark which means it is unusable for us. Haha maybe if things go well in the near future maybe.

I tried what you mention, I exported my project than tried to convert the audio files within the folder. But surprisingly for me, the audio files came out at almost exactly the same size. The maximum reduction I could get from a 1.6MB file was less than 0.1MB.

just to let you both know the common information going around.

C2 doesnt' every play WAV files. Ever. Never ever plays a wav file. What the manual and tutorial say and maybe not so clearly. Is that C2 will import WAV files and convert them to ogg/mp4. However once imported every just deletes the wav file because it's never used. The reason could be that for a commercial product like C2 a WAV to ogg/mp4 are probably free. but that's just speculation why C2 doesn't support other format conversiosn. If it did we may need to pay more on the license.

The DOM however has a point. Sometimes C2 has problems converting. Such as converting a music file that won't play properly. In these situations your better off handling conversion manually.

jayderyu, thanks for that info. I did test it a few times and I did try deleting the wav files. I am not sure if the others also notice, but for my case, it looks like there was no need to delete the wav files. Even after deleting, I notice that the overall download size never decreased. So I tried to export my project, and noticed that it only exported one type of media file, which was the OGG in my case for the mobile export. Perhaps C2 just hold on to the different formats, and than only selects the proper one depending on which export function you choose?

True, in certain cases it would definitely be better to convert the files ourself. So far after some testing, it looks like C2 won't convert properly if the audio files are lower than 16k mhz. Hmm......I think I am going to try using audacity to convert an OGG with lower mhz and see if it still works with the game.

Construct 2 imports the WAV files so you have your original uncompressed copies around in case you want to recompress them in future. However it never plays them, never exports them, and does not count them towards the estimated download size.

Construct 2's importer has fairly limited controls over quality due to the encoders we use. If you want to have more control (e.g. compress your tracks more heavily so they are as small as possible), just use your own encoding software to create the .m4a and .ogg, and import those files in to C2.

ASHLEY. Thank you. Yup, after some testing I saw that C2 was smart enough to only export which audio format we needed. Which was really nice!

I will try to export the files directly as m4a and ogg and try them out. But when I use audacity to export to m4a and ogg, the file size is actually very similar to C2's export. So for the time being, I will use the C2 converted files. Haha if I feel that my total game really needs to thin down the size, I will return to this and try more audio compression settings.