MP4 Audio

Does Construct in someway support or do you plan to support .m4a files? From experience in encoding mp3 to m4a you get fraction of filesize and barely noticeable sound difference. If you use original RAW audio than you get max quality vs size. I can re-encode a non music file 1/4 size before I notice any difference and 50-75% size with music file, but its never staticy or grainy like a wma just some instruments sounds are in different pitch/tone. From a raw file there is no reason not to use m4a aside from its new and mostly supposed on cell phones.

Same for mp4 video files also.

Why not use OGG? It's supported by Construct. Better compression than mp3, and loopable.

From personal encoding experience, seems to me LAME mp3 is close to ogg in terms of size and quality (for 16bit sound anyway). I uploaded some sample tracks of different encoding of the same wave file so anyone can see for themselves. (I would encode from .raw data but do not have the technology in my hands to do so.) Nero He - AAC v2 m4a basically outclasses everything else out there - based on tests run months ago. The m4a is 44kbps, rest are standard 128kbps. I can tell the difference, but most can't, and if you plan on using m4a in the first place then there is no "difference", you just use 1/4 the size for your sounds.

44k TranceTest16bitPCMm4a

128k TranceTest16bitPCMmp3

• TranceTest16bitPCMogg
• TranceTest16bitPCMwav
• TranceTest24bit_1Packed_intm4a
• TranceTest24bit_1Packed_intwav
• TranceTest32bitPCMm4a
• TranceTest32bitPCMwav

Reason there isn't 24bit and 32bit mp3 or ogg is because it turns into loud static when encoding with those settings. Note some hardware might not support 24 & 32bit.

I have hundreds of instruments and sounds and I want to compose sounds together at runtime and vary things on a whim to make things more lively. Having 1/4 the size for audio without it sounding like its 1/4 the size would be nice. Even if I'd have to scratch the composing, I'd still like 1/4 the size per song. Might be something to consider looking into.

The main things with supporting file formats is:

1) Is it free to use non commercially?

2) Is there an easy to use free programming API for it?

I don't know for sure but I suspect neither is true for MP4 - I don't think I've seen any libraries that support it, other than Directshow with a special filter installed. Do you know any libraries that we could use?

The main things with supporting file formats is:

1) Is it free to use non commercially?

2) Is there an easy to use free programming API for it?

I don't know for sure but I suspect neither is true for MP4 - I don't think I've seen any libraries that support it, other than Directshow with a special filter installed. Do you know any libraries that we could use?

I'm not sure, but isn't this something you could use?

Bento4 portable MP4 file format library

EDIT: Here is another one, I found it by following the hint in this forum thread:

mp4v2