Creating FL compatible WAVs using LAME
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I posted this about a year ago on one of the old TLRs and it failed to get much attention, but I’m posting it again here in the hope someone will find it useful.
All of the tutorials that I’ve seen on the subject of adding new sound files to FL suggest using Window’s built-in MP3 encoder to make the new WAV files. However, there’s one problem with this approach: the quality of the resulting files isn’t good, especially at lower bitrates. This is why I created an encoder plugin for dBpowerAMP that uses LAME (generally considered to be the best MP3 encoder) and mpa2wav to create compatible sound files.
You can get the plugin here.
For the settings to use, I’d recommend that you leave the encoding quality on high. High is a step up from normal quality-wise and very high quality doesn’t noticeably improve the quality while taking about 2x as long to encode. I’d also suggest using Variable Bitrate Quality, which attempts to make all encodings at the same setting have the same quality. Keep in mind that this will result in files that have different average bitrates but that will have the same perceived quality. As for the quality setting to use, you should experiment to find the one that balances quality and size for what you want. For reference, Flak’s soundtrack is encoded using quality 8, which seems to be a pretty good balance between fairly small files that don’t sound too bad.
A bit of background on what format FL’s sound files are in: at the core they’re just normal MP3 files. The difference between them and normal MP3s is that they’re encapsulated in a WAV file. The way the plugin works is this: the input file is decoded by dBpowerAMP, which sends the decoded audio to the LAME command line application, which in turn outputs a standard MP3 file. This MP3 file is then passed to mpa2wav, which encapsulates the MP3 stream in a WAV file that FL can understand and decode.
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That’s awesome M0tah ;D
I’ve been using Vegas (mainly) to get the bitrate “close” but i seem to be getting a “missing codec?” error now…
Im going to have a look at this
thanks M0tah. -
So, I’ve been trying to track down all the bugs of FW:ToW and I have the notorious MP3 decode error. I used the program you recommend, with the settings you did, M0tah, and I have more errors now as well as a new one wavlib: failed to decompress sound. Any idea what is going on M0tah? I can send you the spew if you want?
