[James Ross]

disc, on 01 October 2013 - 05:04 AM, said:

MP3 why? It's old, and have bad quality/bitrate if it's about support, then why not AAC? That's much better, and that's a standard today, supported everywhere.

I am pretty sure MP3 is better supported than AAC, but it doesn't make much difference - my point was that Opus is not well supported nor is it particularly relevant to this use case.

AAC does look like a reasonable option.

[gpz]

It is worth to mention that mp3 is not free. Currently license fees are not enforced on free softwares, but it is subject to change at any time. Commercial addon publishers would definitely need to pay the fee.

[James Ross]

gpz, on 01 October 2013 - 09:26 AM, said:

It is worth to mention that mp3 is not free. Currently license fees are not enforced on free softwares, but it is subject to change at any time. Commercial addon publishers would definitely need to pay the fee.

AAC is not outside of such things either, with free and open source implementations of the codec only allowed to be distributed in source form.

[disc]

Then ogg vorbis, that's still better than mp3 (and even than aac), while it's free and opensource, and every sound applications handle it, except the microsoft junk. (even my old mp3 player from 2005 can handle it).

[James Ross]

disc, on 02 October 2013 - 06:07 AM, said:

Then ogg vorbis, that's still better than mp3 (and even than aac), while it's free and opensource, and every sound applications handle it, except the microsoft junk. (even my old mp3 player from 2005 can handle it).

At the end of the day, I think picking "preferred" file formats for most things is a fairly subjective task, so we will probably have to do a technical comparison (acceptable bitrates, support in tooling, hardware decoding, etc.). I don't think Ogg Vorbis is as well supported as MP3 or AAC, but we'd have to actually check - and decide which tools matter in such decisions. (The Microsoft "junk" might have to matter, for example, if that is actually what people in the trainsim community use/want to use.)

[disc]

James Ross, on 02 October 2013 - 07:14 AM, said:

At the end of the day, I think picking "preferred" file formats for most things is a fairly subjective task, so we will probably have to do a technical comparison (acceptable bitrates, support in tooling, hardware decoding, etc.). I don't think Ogg Vorbis is as well supported as MP3 or AAC, but we'd have to actually check - and decide which tools matter in such decisions. (The Microsoft "junk" might have to matter, for example, if that is actually what people in the trainsim community use/want to use.)

I think none of them have hardware decoding on PC. I've never heard of hardware audio decoding on pc, just video decoding. Who would want to use windows media player, or movie maker, and such? As microsoft don't have any useable audio editors. Audacity, goldwave, audition, and others all have support for every kind of codecs.

There were professional tests on sound themed sites(, and the result are usually these: low bitrates(best is the first, these bitrates are likely to be used in a game) opus>vorbis>aac>mp3, at high bitrates vorbis>opus>aac>mp3, but the difference between vorbis and aac is not much, the big difference is between mp3 and the others,, always mp3 is the worst in everything, which is understandable, as it is a quite ancient format. It's good to know, that opus is reaching the 20 khz max recordable frequency limit on lowest bitrate, others need higher bitrate to represent the full audible range, and it's good to have these for high frequency sounds like diesel locomotive turbo charger sounds. Mp3 needs the highest bitrate to have the high frequency cutoff disabled, also mp3 have the most noticeable artifacting at lower bitrates.

[markus_GE]

The Problem with mp3´s bitrates more likely is not due to the format´s Age, but more likely due to the fact that it´s a quite severely compressed Format. IE, it Needs to be decoded before it can be played, which will slow down bitrates, of course. At least that´s what we were told in our DP classes two years ago.

Cheers, Markus

[gpz]

James Ross, on 01 October 2013 - 05:48 AM, said:

Opus is good for recording in real-time but we're not interested in that for content sounds. (...) Opus is not well supported nor is it particularly relevant to this use case.

I have never heard about opus before mentioning it here, but after reading some information about it, it turned out to me that opus format is not only a real-time streaming media replacement candidate, but also wants to supersede high-quality content formats, such as mp3 and vorbis. And it technically does indeed, so it is relevant to our use case. Eventually we might end up with supporting two additional formats: mp3 for compatibility reasons, and opus for commercial publishers and for those who prefer quality over popularity. There will also support be needed for standard cue sheets as separate files with similar file name as the corresponding audio file.

[eric from trainsim]

I'd like to see support for animated textures as opposed to shapes...

GIF would be nice, but if there were a way to define a banner ad type image rotation, that would work too. I'd rather not have to break out GMAX just to make something with a flashing light...

[disc]

eolesen, on 03 October 2013 - 06:05 AM, said:

I'd like to see support for animated textures as opposed to shapes...

GIF would be nice, but if there were a way to define a banner ad type image rotation, that would work too. I'd rather not have to break out GMAX just to make something with a flashing light...

TS/Railworks have animated texture feature, you need to simply save each frames to a seperate file, and if you tick "texture is animated" in material editor, it will load, play and loop these textures. I think such thing would be good for OR too frames in dds files. GIF only supports 256 colors.