I am thinking of try to shave my current game (Tactical Warrior), or at least its lite version, down to 20MB if possible. I realized most of the games size is its music and sounds. I was wondering, what bitrates and what formats do you guys suggest for music in a game? Right now my music is at a bitrate of 262 and encoded as AAC, because this is the default iTunes did for me.
You could try converting to CAF, I'm pretty sure that will be smaller once everything is packaged up. Also, if you have access to the mixes, you can try mixing down sound files that are in stereo to mono. Since the only time you have stereo is with headphones, going mono a lot of the time can save space. Your game is awesome btw.
Thanks guys. I just realized I still had the music in stereo I guess that means than when mixed down to mono it will be 128kbps. It looks like if I save the music at 64kbps I can probably make the 20MB limit. Do you think 64kb audio will be a noticeable downgrade? Listening to my in battle music at 64 and 128 I can't notice the difference, but I don't know what to listen for. Also, what do you guys use to compress your audio? Right now I am just using afconvert at the command prompt.
I doubt it will be too noticeable. You would have to have some pretty decent headphones for it to be real noticeable, and if I may your game pulls enough attention away from the music and to the gameplay that I doubt anyone would notice unless they were really looking for it. As far as I know, afconvert is about as robust a digital compressor as there can be since there are only so many ways to change bits into compressed bits.
If our main sell point is music I would not downgrade it, but otherwise it will be really hard to notice on the device speakers and the crap of earspeakers people are running around with. Most times iPod will be playing anyway.
In that case I will definitely just go with the 64kbps music. With that and a few other small things I am down to 19MB. Thanks guys
We went with VBR (variable bit rate) mp3, which compressed real tight (err tite) and sounded quite similar at various settings. The musician was happy...at the time :-D
