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i googling like crazy to find ogg music only to find MIDI and MP3, anyone know where i can legally download *.ogg file?

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ogg is still not a widely popular format, you often find it in archived sound files.

To get .ogg, you do two steps:

1.) Convert to .wav
2.) Convert to .ogg

mp3 -> wav -> ogg is not recommended, since the mp3 quality file has such loss already. Might as well just use the mp3 file.

midi -> wav can be accomplished by using a tool such Timidity or Synthfont.
wav -> ogg can be accomplished by using a tool such as Audacity.

And also, kindly use music that are appropriately licensed, thanks.

Well, as DaFool said, it's hard to find files using ogg standard, because it's not that widely used and popular as mp3. The best way is to convert the files, and there's no problem with conversion from mp3's, although you have to watch out for bitrates (the quality of files). 192kbs used to be described as the most good choice of compression, because it has both the high quality and files don't eat that much space as higher values such as 320kbps (which is near CD quality), although I wouldn't recomend this level. The most appropriate thing to do would be to compress files to 128kbs - it's the most lower possible level when the music still has some of the quality left, and the sound isn't cracking, nor doesn't have any sound artifacts. Just remember not to decode files with lower bitrates to higher values, only the other way around.

As for the decoding, I recommend using SUPER (http://www.erightsoft.com/S6Kg1.html) - it's free and you can decode various types of files into other formats. The link to the setup file should be somewhere at the bottom of this page. Don't forget to read the manual, because at first glance program might seem a little bit complicated to use. I'd be also glad to help if you'll need it.

Good luck with decoding!

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There's a load of ogg music that's creative commons licensed on jamendo.org (or com, i forget). There's a lot of good stuff too.

You can also convert mp3s to ogg. Do a google search to find a program to do that on your platform (operating system).

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I personally reccomend Audacity to convert MP3 files to OGG; I also wouldn't worry about the file size. I'd go ahead and use 192kb/s or higher, as quality should always be top priority. Really, higher quality files don't come up to that much bigger a size, anyway.

Well, the 192kbps files are almost twice less in space than the 320 ones, but use more than half of the space of a 128 kbps and the quality gain is minimal (it depends on how was the file compressed. If it has large ammount of frames, the quality will be almost the same). Well, it doesn't matter nowadays when we can have a hard drive of 1TB of space, but IT is important if you want to distribute your game through the net with the proper music files provided. File transfers aren't that cheap and most of the servers have restrictions on how much file transfer can be made during a month. If you have a soundtrack, lets say about circa 10 tracks, with file size of aproximately 30-40 megs you can save alot of free space. The game will be also downloaded faster, because the things that weight alot are always music and video files.

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What's wrong with 256kb or isn't it just a standard bitrate?

I found...

*64kbps -> really crappy
*96kbps -> iffy. I had used them on previous games, they sounded ok in Windows, but now when replaying my games on Mac, there's a lot of stuttering.
*128kbps -> standard moderate quality mp3s you find on the net.

192kbps is between 128 and 256, while 256 is between 192 and 320 (increments of 64).

Is there any problem with using a non-standard bitrate, is it just convention they are all multiples of 64?

I'd recommend you this article about mp3 bitrate, which is similar to the one used in ogg vorbis streams.

The simple mechanics of these codecs are to remove frequencies of a sound that a standard human ear can't react to. That's why they are lossy, that's why they might leave artifacts, that's why they weight a lot less than the original recorded sound.

These bitrates are the standard settings for encoding bitrates, meaning they are set just so and even if the final file is lossy, there's still room for a little more "cutting".

That's why there are constant and variable encoding bitrates (respectively CBR and VBR).
On VBR, the cutting process makes the bitrate variable so that you save even more space.

I generally use oggdrop from the vorbis organisation to encode in ogg. It's really simple: drag& drop and your file is being encoded whether on the selected bitrate if you encode in CBR or directly in VBR.
You can find this wonderful tool there.
I generally encode in VBR to save some space, you don't really notice any quality difference.

Well, if you have an absolute pitch ability, please pardon me if I inflicted you such stress.

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I agree that in most cases the difference in certain bitrates won't be noticeable, but when you're used to working with very high quality audio and sound equiptment you begin to notice these things a lot better. Generally if you're going to shoot for file size in music files, I'd say to shoot for ~10mb per file, assuming each is a typical 2 minute looping track. Of course this means you'd have to encode at a pretty big bitrate, but it won't even effect the size of your game that much unless you have a particularly large soundtrack.

The typical Ren'Py project has 10MB of Ren'Py and maybe another 10MB for everything else, excluding music. Taking Winter Shard as an example, the entire visual novel takes 60.5MB, 39.9MB of which is music - and the median file per piece of music size 1.5MB. Increasing the file size of each of the 18 music pieces to 10MB would bring the total size over 200MB, which is an increase by more than a factor of three - and Winter Shard is already one of the larger Ren'Py projects in terms of file size.

10MB music files would vastly increase the file size of the typical Ren'Py visual novel.

Ren'Py is actually a bit smaller than that. Right now, the windows stuff is a touch under 4 megs compressed. It's the compressed size that matters, as that's what affects download speed... and the music files won't compress at all.

(I need to have a go at shrinking that a bit more.)

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That's why I'm not against high quality files. I love them like everyone else does, but when it comes to means of sharing our distributions, the quality of music files has to give up. I'm also confused about my particular project, neverthless wouldn't like to lower the quality of in-game music. It seems that nowadays most of people have quite good internet connections (we're not talking about the disk space because almost none cares about this), but we have also to think about those, who hadn't. It isn't funny when you download even a ~30 mb file on a 56 kbps/s modem connection

That's why I propably stick to encoding files into 128 kbps, when it comes to various game projects or go into a golden mean and use 160 kbps, which is a good choice beetwen quality and size.

btw, don't forget we can always use various music tracker formats such as mod, xm, it and so on... This is also a very good choice and the file sizes are really small because they mostly depend on complexity of the music.

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http://www.visual-novels.pl/ - Polish visual novel translation and development community
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