ogg vs wav

BlitzMax Forums/BlitzMax Programming/ogg vs wav

Tachyon (Posted 2005) [#1]

Since OGGs are highly compressed waveforms, I assume there is more CPU time used to decode/play those sound files over uncompressed WAVs. I've noticed in several of the demos included with BlitzMax that OGGs are used not only for music, but all the sound effects as well. Question: has anyone ever experienced any noticable slowdowns when using OGGs exlusively for all sound effects & music, say mixing up to 5-6 sounds at once? I am ready to move a very large sound library over to a BlitzMax-ported game and I would like to know ahead of time if there is a reason I should not use the OGG format for all the sound.

REDi (Posted 2005) [#2]

AFAIK all the oggs decompression is done when the sound is actualy loading, once it has loaded it is exactly the same as a WAV sound, there is no CPU overhead other than when the sound is loading/decompressing.

Tachyon (Posted 2005) [#3]

Ouch! If what you say is true, then a 4 minute music track would be decompressed to somthing like 40MB or so in RAM...that's not so good.

Robert Cummings (Posted 2005) [#4]

Thats fine. It happens everywhere. Even if you stream it using FMOD there is no real performance hit.