Hi,

I'm designing sound for an indie game that's under developement. My goal is to use PD to dynamically trigger/blend sounds depending on game data, and by randomly selecting background sounds and music loops.

I got it pretty far by using [soundfiler] loading .wav files into arrays and [tabread4~] reading from the arrays. It looped nicely without any clicks, and I could easily change playback speed. But ofcourse I needed to compress all files to .ogg format, and I realized that [soundfiler] doesn't seem to accept that format...

So I tried using [oggread~] and writing its output to arrays with [tabwrite~], but then I have to wait for all the files to play through before [tabread4~] can read them from the arrays. And [oggread~] makes awful pops when it loops so I can't use it for looping the files.

Does anyone know a good solution? I have read about sndfiler, wich seems to be a good solution, but they state that it can crash patches etc, and I don't really know how to install it and get it to work. Anyone of you had any experience with sndfiler? If you can help me with another solution to my problem or with getting sndfiler to work, I'd appreciate it!

Thanks!

Unfortunately i think your best option is going to be using uncompressed sound files. Perhaps a solution would be to have all the files play through and load at the very beginning of the patch, or at least well before they are needed, and only use .WAV files for the first sounds that are used.

I don't really know how much CPU that would be using though if you had a lot of them.

I tried to get sndfiler working but haven't accomplished it yet.

random thought..
what would happen if you doubled the speed of the original files, and then played them back from the table at a slower speed?

would that degrade the quality of the file significantly?

it would give you a better loading time anyway.

Hi, thanks for your response!

Good thought there with speeding them up, theoretically it should work. But I'd rather find another solution before I try that out. I kind of have got it to work now, but I have trouble making my arrays the exact lenght as I can't use soundfiler to resize them, and it seems like [oggread~] adds some silence after each file is played... I've tried calculating the size manually but don't really know how to. Does [oggread~] output PCM-coded sound?

Many sounds are short, like laser bursts and click-sounds. But my big problem right now is the intro music, wich I composed with four different loops that are approx. 18 s long each. I thought that all loops can load and while they are loading, the first loop is being played back (as it is loading). That would cover up the loadtime nicely i guess. I'd like to use uncompressed format, but that will make the game too large in the end...

I recently tried the whole up-sampling oggread~ to load files into a table but sizing the arrays . . . anyway you know all about it. I ended up switching over to libpd.

https://github.com/libpd

It makes communication between a game engine and pd less cumbersome (no networking/dynamic patching stuff) and I wrote an ogg file loader in c of which the decoded data can be copied to a pd array using one of libpd's functions:

int libpd_write_array(const char *dest, int offset, float *src, int n)

also, here is a link to an ogg/vorbis file loading tutorial:

http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/game-programming/introduction-to-ogg-vorbis-r2031

but instead of ov_read() you will need ov_read_float() which outputs audio data just the way pd likes it.

BTW, I know this post is old and you probably have this all sorted out but I figure this may be of some use to someone.

Hi, Rayniter

I'm trying to use ogg file in libpd, could you be more specific?

what do you mean you wrote an ogg file loader?

Did you wrote an pd external and used it in pd? Or did you directly convert and read ogg file to pd array?

Rayniter, that's ace! Actually I never got it sorted as the project was laid on ice :/ but now maybe I will finish my sound engine if your extension works! Do you want to share your oggfile loader?