Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Sound File Formats

L3 Extended Diploma in Games Design
Unit 73: Sound for Computer Games

Aims:
P2 understand the methods and principles of sound design and production
Research and explain when you would use the following sounds format and why?

Sound file formats
Uncompressed: e.g. wav (Waveform Audio File Format) is a large audio file. Mainly used for storing audio files on PC’s and is used by Microsoft, aiff (Audio Interchange File Format) is an audio storage file which was produced by Apple Computer, au (AU File Format) is a simple audio file format created by sun microsystems, smp, voc (Creative Voice File) was developed by creative Labs and is used for storing sound and speech.

Lossy compression: e.g. mp3 (MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is an audio coding format and digital audio, ra Real Audio format designed for online streaming audio over the internet and vox mainly uses the dialogic ADPCM (Adaptive Differential Pulse Code Modulation) codec.
 Audio Sampling
1.How can resolution and bit-depth constrain file size? They can constrain the file size by not being able to be used on devices like MP3 and other lossy compressions, it also effects the amount of storage available on that storage device. Resolution can constrain file size by becoming better pixelated which then leads to it becoming a larger file size and therefore taking up more room on the file.
2. Explain what the following words mean:
Sample rate - Sample rate is the amount of samples taken over a number of seconds to represent the recordings digitally.
Mono – Mono is sound that only comes from one speaker and only from the direction that is placed in, this was used before stereo.
Stereo – Stereo is when it has two speakers which can project sound from two different angles not just one. This is a better than the previous mono which could only have one speaker to project the sound.
Surround -  Surround sound is when there are several speakers used and are placed around the room you’re in and give you a better experience of the sound as it gets projected from multiple directions.  
 

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