ogg dev - Mar 2013 - can you suggest on extending ogg as short-clip container and the make of its tool?

Hello.

I am thinking of developing a tool for computer game makers, enabling  
them using an ogg file to hold a collection of very short context  
audio clips. I am looking for suggestion on usefulness of the tool  
once it is made, and its design.

By "very short context audio" I mean the audio clips that usually is  
the response to a mouse-click or key press. e.g. a clicking sound, a  
gun shot, sound of a punch, sound of a door opening. Longer audio like  
opening music and background music can reasonablly have files of their  
own, but such very short context clips, most of them less than one  
second, only chokes file systems.

I am considerin to design for this workflow:

To prepare the file:

1. the computer game makers record each short clip on a file of its  
own, in raw codec bitstream.
2. they can then use a book-binder tool, which encloses each clip in  
an ogg page of audio, enclose each clip's file name in an ogg page of  
subtitle, and concatenates them altogether.

The resulting ogg file may contain thousands of clips in one ogg file,  
when opened directly, is a long audio with subtitles being each clip's  
file name

To use the file:

The file can be fast bisection sought on clip name (stored as  
subtitle). Once clip name is located, its next page must be its audio.

Feasibility:

An ogg page is usually 4-8kB, as I tested corresponds to 1 to 2  
seconds opus audio. Ogg page maxes at 64kB, equivilent to 11 seconds,  
enough to hold longest context audio clip of most games, and having  
multiple pages corresponding to one subtitle piece is okay with the  
design too.

--

The tool can be something like this:

$ oggz binder --page-size=32kB --codec opus clip1.raw clip2.raw ... >  
clips.ogg

I have two more specific questions:

1. Is it better to design a tool that only handle bookbinding of raw  
audios, and let oggz-merge to merge the subtitle (file-names) into it?  
This fits the one-tool-does-one-thing-only idea, but I am afraid made  
things unnecessarily complicated.

2. Are there other USE CASES of this tool? If you can name other  
typical use cases, the tool-smith should consider making the tool more  
suitable for multiple purposes, adding re-use value, and this better  
be thought before making the tool.


Best regards!
Gildor Oronar



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On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 7:43 PM, <gildororonar at mail-on.us> wrote:
>  very short context clips, most of them less than one
> second, only chokes file systems.
>
I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion, but I think you should
revisit it.  I think everyone, including you, will be a lot happier if you
store each sound effect clip in its own file.  This is a common practice
for sound effects and samples in ogg.

If you have many thousands of sound effects clips (unlikely), you may need
to separate them into different subdirectories for filesystem performance
reasons, but that is still going to be a better solution than concatenating
them.
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Quoting "Benjamin Schwartz" <ben at
bemasc.net>:
>
> I'm not sure how you reached this conclusion, but I think you should
> revisit it.  I think everyone, including you, will be a lot happier if you
> store each sound effect clip in its own file.  This is a common practice
> for sound effects and samples in ogg.
No it is not a common practise. In fact I fail to find a single  
computer game using separate file for each context / sound effect  
short clips.

I will start naming a few that I studied in the last a few days.  
Samurai Sprit PC edition, Fallout 3 and Skyrim, L.A. Norie. Most  
common practise is to enclose them in something indexable. For  
example, lots of Bethesda games uses an container format (seems  
non-compressing) they invented themselves, called ".bsa". I'd like
to
say using each game vendor's own archive format is more likely the  
standard practise.

There are a few strong reasons to do it: the clips are often as short  
as 4kB, in a 64kB cluster file system it is a waste of more than 90%  
space. If they are installed on FAT32 the FS chokes more.

Your suggests in a strong voice, how are you going to back that up?

Best regards


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