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Question - IDE Working with large numbers of audio files (7000+ voice clips)

teasot

Member
Hi,

I am currently working on a project with a large number of audio files: 7152 voice lines (850MB or so, 5 hours 45 minutes in length), plus a decent sized soundtrack (approx 1hour 30 min in length).
I am making sure to use Audio Groups, with 664 audio groups created to categorise the voice clips.

I am finding that sometimes when saving, or closing the Audio Group tab (I need to take breaks assigning all these groups manually!) that the project can become unresponsive, and I get pretty scared that the project will crash and I will lose my work (it uses a lot of RAM during these periods too). So far it has not.

Is there anyone else dealing with large volumes of audio files? How are you handling this issue?

Thanks
 

Ricardo

Member
I deal with huge amounts of audio files too, however I never tried to have them inside the IDE in groups. I just have everything as included files and play them on demand as audio streams. Works like a charm, saves me the time of managing the AGs and keeps memory usage low. The obvious disadvantage is that the files are exposed in the game folder… but you can always change their extension or even go a bit more extreme by saving them as compressed buffers so they can’t be easily played by a regular user.
 

TsukaYuriko

☄️
Forum Staff
Moderator
I am finding that sometimes when saving, or closing the Audio Group tab (I need to take breaks assigning all these groups manually!) that the project can become unresponsive, and I get pretty scared that the project will crash and I will lose my work (it uses a lot of RAM during these periods too). So far it has not.
What are you more afraid of, the doctor pulling your teeth out or brushing your teeth? ;)

In other words, what are you more afraid of, losing your work or making backups?


Thanks for that idea. Time to rerender them all as OGG's, I guess...
You can load external sounds in more formats than OGG Vorbis. You can also load raw PCM audio data via audio_create_buffer_sound. WAV files are raw PCM audio with a header, so if you strip out the header during loading and only load the raw audio...
 

teasot

Member
Hi,

As I want to go with as uncompressed as possible, I will give audio_create_buffer_sound a shot too.
Thank you both, I was going insane manually mapping the 600+ audio groups.
 

teasot

Member
Hi,

Thanks for this. I think I will stick with OGG until later in development, then swap back to WAV.
Either way, this has saved me a LOT of time: I have moved all OST and voicelines to the "datafiles" column and am loading it from there, instead of storing them as sounds in the project.
I think I will add random beeps and boops and other common sound effects in the project, but even then might dynamically load and unload them to save memory, depending.

I actually am finding the "load -> play -> free when done" is giving me way more freedom than audio groups ever could, and am only loading bleeps and bloops to reduce disk usage, as these will be called often.

I actually don't mind having sounds and music available to the user - people will rip the sound anyway, may as well make it easier.

Adjacent to this, I have had to convert all the movies into .WEBM, and due to their low resolution used the lossless encoding options. I found streaming video to be pretty much the only option, and again streaming saves a lot of memory.

Thanks!
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
I think I will add random beeps and boops and other common sound effects in the project, but even then might dynamically load and unload them to save memory, depending.
I would STRONGLY recommend using the sound assets in the IDE for all sound effects. Trying to stream sound effects will be an unnecessary drain on CPU power, and you risk issues with audio lag. It's just not really efficient or worthwhile when it comes to very short audio.
 

Ricardo

Member
I would STRONGLY recommend using the sound assets in the IDE for all sound effects. Trying to stream sound effects will be an unnecessary drain on CPU power, and you risk issues with audio lag. It's just not really efficient or worthwhile when it comes to very short audio.
Have you had a bad experience streaming short sound effects? I’m curious because I’m currently abusing that system and couldn’t find a single issue even profiling a super old laptop with a low HDD and garbage CPU. I mean, I understand why it’s technically not efficient to keep streaming super short sounds that would be better staying in memory, but I wonder how much streaming needs to be abused in order to actually create a problem in modern hardware.
 
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Have you had a bad experience streaming short sound effects? I’m curious because I’m currently abusing that system and couldn’t find a single issue even profiling a super old laptop with a low HHD and garbage CPU. I mean, I understand why it’s technically not efficient to keep streaming super short sounds that would be better staying in memory, but I wonder how much streaming needs to be abused in order to actually create a problem in modern hardware.
Do you have a fast hard drive?
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
Have you had a bad experience streaming short sound effects? I’m curious because I’m currently abusing that system and couldn’t find a single issue even profiling a super old laptop with a low HDD and garbage CPU. I mean, I understand why it’s technically not efficient to keep streaming super short sounds that would be better staying in memory, but I wonder how much streaming needs to be abused in order to actually create a problem in modern hardware.
I confess I haven't. But when I worked at YYG I was told that this is not how things should be done and will cause problems, and it does make sense... Although modern hardware is a lot more powerful now. I would suspect that it would be an issue on those games that are just scraping past on the FPS, but if you've got a healthy max FPS it probably isn't an issue.
 
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