Anyone in game development?
I’ve been trying to find out about the typical quality of sound assets in games. I can totally see a ton fo small snippets for environmental audio being lossless, but I would guess that the vast majority is lossy. Then put together by the engine and finally sent out to be compressed and bit-streamed or pumped out as PCM.
But the output doesn’t really matter all that much if the assets aren’t of high quality, right?
To the best of my knowledge it depends on the project: the vast majority of new sounds are recorded at a minimum of 44.1kHz with 16-bit stereo, but there are still a lot of 22kHz (and even some 8kHz) assets being used, especially in indie games and smaller studios.
This isn’t consistent, though: a lot of smaller outfits buy assets from marketplaces devoted to that purpose ( Superace88 188first prize188 ⚡ this month only lists a few), use sounds with open licenses, or create lower quality originals with tools like http://www.bfxr.net/ .
In my limited experience, waay back in 2006, we used 48kHz, 256kbps MP3 files. They were sorta inherited from a previous project and nobody seemed to hear the difference when we compared them to ATRAC at 256kbps.
Most bigger companies reuse a lot of such assets I guess, so the generic sound assets like doors opening, wind, rain etc will not be very high quality and probably quite old. The game specific sounds would probably be much better quality, since they are created newly.
Most sound assets are recorded and stored in some lossless format and then encoded and used in-game based on the audio designer’s suggestions, free space, ease of mixing with other assets (which is why almost all assets in a game are encoded with similar settings and the same codec)