Wav Or Ogg

Help, Support & Bugs Beginners Questions - Renoise
1

Hello every body!!

As a french user, sorry for my bad english. So i’ll try to explain my problems.

I’ve a huge bank of sample (over 30gb) and all files are in wav format.
So i ask if it’s a good idea to convert it to ogg to gain size.

Is there less quality between wav and ogg ??

I tried to convert some wav to test. Renoise can open off format and i’m very happy.
But if i modify the sample, i can’t save it in ogg but only in wav.

What advice can you give.

Thanks.

2

I advice you to perform OGG conversion only in the final stage of composition, if you really have to. You can use the comfortable OGG converter for XRNS.

OGG is a lossy format: you will loose quality each time you save a sample to OGG so, if you edit an OGG file, it will be saved as WAV in Renoise and then, when you resave it to OGG, it will loose quality another time.

Renoise can also load/save into lossless FLAC format (see Imp/Export tab in the preferences)

3

Thanks for the quick response.

4

My advice is keep them in WAV format. OGG is a lossy codec, so quality will suffer. It may not be immediately audible but you will definitely lose some of the lowest lows and the highest highs.

You’d do yourself a favor if you get additional disk space. An external HDD perhaps (I’d recommend Western Digital).

If you can’t spare the cash and still want to compress your samples - use FLAC. It will compress less than OGG but it’s a lossless codec.

Edit: damn lack of typing skills :)

5

I converted all my samples from wav to ogg format.
I used the oggdropXP-tool to do so and set the encoder to a quality of 8 (around 256kbit/s). This shrinked my samples-dir from 20 GB to 4 GB.

For many samples (like drums, drumloops, etc) it’s totally ok - you can not hear any difference.

6

what about converting your samples from .wav to .flac??

will that also give a bad quality??

7

Nope It’s lossless, so it plays like the original file exact.
wikiwiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless

flac is my friend.

8

Yep, flac is definatly the deluxe solution if you want to save space while not want to sacrify quality.
On the other hand, using OGG’s like benjam mentioned isn’t really bad either. There’s not really a noticeable difference when using compressed ogg samples. Atleast for me…

9

Noticable, perhaps not for the single instrument itself, but for mixing and specially mastering it might cause trouble to get certain instruments in a different space if some frequencies are lacking.

10

FLAC

11

Get an extra harddrive!
Seriously, those things are getting cheaper and cheaper these days!

12

Can anyone recommend tools to FLAC thousands of files in dozens of directories/subdirectories in one go?

13

Probably not helping, but the linux shellscript I’m using for that:

massflac.sh:

#!/bin/sh  
  
for f in *.wav; do flac -8 "$f"; done  
rm *.wav

That does require the presence of the ‘flac’ encoder though. ;)
Should work that way on OSX as well.

EDIT: whoops. Didn’t read it all - It’s not helping with the subdirectory problem, sorry.