Factorio Forums

I'm loving the game so far, but the music audio quality is bugging the hell out of me!
It has the sound of something that has either been compressed with a really low bitrate or been re-encoded multiple times.

+1
I disabled the music because of the high compression.

yeah this is my only problem is the low quality audio ... sounds great if its a transformer changing shape but music needs to be nice quality

the music the sound give an atmosphere to a universe making it good quality can make the difference in a sale or no sale ... i know how alphas are and small downloads saves money when there are many updates and not much cash

suggest to the devs if you like to keep the audio low to save server costs ...

maybe making (only the audio not the game) higher quality download as a torrent that we can drag into the game folder i cant speak for everyone but i dont mind giving a little bandwidth up so others may enjoy the music in the game the way it was ment to be enjoyed (at full quality x

Maybe someone could make a mod?

..\Factorio\data\core\sound\ambient

Those are the files that would need to be changed..

I thought a large part of the audio right now was placeholder. Now with the new trailer(with a composer!), I'm sure some new music will be in the game in 0.10 in addition to machine sounds.

@Developers
If you want high quality music in Factorio without using to much of a hard drive space I recomend adding support for MOD music (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module_file)
These music files can be quite small. On my computer I have colection of many MOD music files (over 16 hours of music) and their size is just over 300 MB.
This is mainly due the fact that MOD music files are comprised from several smaller samples, and patterns (special notation system which also contains special commands for using special effects, adjusting tempo, jumping to different positions, etc.)
Now since the final music is programatically composed on playback it is not hard to modify the playback routine so that it can dynamically make changes to the music that is is being played. For instance.
During normal gameplay you play muaisc using predefined pattern using predefined tempo. When player engages with biters you speed up the tempo and change certain instruments (spamples) which would result in a different more energetic music being played. Naturally cou could even go and switch to different music paters to get even better expirience. Anywhay if you do it right it can greatly affect ingame atmosphere.

FishSandwich wrote:Maybe someone could make a mod?

..\Factorio\data\core\sound\ambient

Those are the files that would need to be changed..

Yes, but impossible unless you're replacing the music entirely, or somehow got your hand on the originals.

Audio compression is usually "lossy", which means that every time you change the format, some information is lost permanently - depending on your target format and parameters.
MP3, possibly the most common format ever, is one such format. It's supposed to be kind of "forgiving" in that it removes information you won't notice as much FIRST (high frequency), but with a low enough target bitrate, it's bound to make a very obvious difference when listening.

I just wanted to pop in here and say that I noticed the extremely low quality (high compression it seems) music, and it got annoying enough that I turned it off within a few minutes of playing. Other than this, I'm absolutely loving the game so far.

Current ambient music is placeholder. Daniel will make a new one completely from scratch.

I registered just to comment on this because hearing the 'placeholder' music made me smile...

2 of the pieces (at least) are from Freesound - they're by ERH (Eric Hopton) - I know this because I used one of those pieces in an App I developed about 18 months ago!!

http://www.freesound.org/people/ERH/sounds/33987/

You can imagine my surprise when I heard that same piece playing in the game "Mirrormoon EP" - I did a bit of digging and it transpires that ERH contibuted to it's soundtrack (although that track, being published 'free' on Freesound, means it can't be included on the soundtrack album they released)

So I smiled again when I heard it here - it's getting around quite a bit isn't it?

Also - you might be able to get a higher-quality OGG from the source files on that page perhaps?

thank you will certainly give this a go trjp