[Tip] Sound/FMOD files too big? Try this!

[Wonderlarr]

Hey there modders! I finally released my first big mod yesterday, and one of the first things people pointed out to me was how big the mod was. It was a whole 44 megabytes, and I came to find out over 30 megabytes of it was JUST sound. After looking into it, it seems like FMOD Designer doesn't apply decent compression by default, and stereo sound files seem to take up more space after a build into fsb (despite the game being mono-only anyway). Here's how you can fix that.

Using Better Compression

FMOD Designer doesn't use particularly efficient compression on the sound banks by default, although the sound quality is pretty high. Unless you're a super-audiophile, you won't notice a difference using these settings.

Open your FMOD project (.fdp file) and click Banks. Select your bank on the left, and on the right change your compression to VORBIS. Below that, change your Compression Quality to 100, to preserve sound quality. You can lower this if you really want, but I don't recommend it unless you really wanna save a tiny bit more space.

This will save a massive amount of space after you rebuild (Ctrl + B menu)

 

Using Mono Sound Files

After some experimentation, I figured out that although sounds are always played in Mono in game and in FMOD, importing stereo sound files into FMOD results in a larger compile size. You can save a bit of space by converting your sound files to mono before importing them into FMOD. I used Audacity to do this, and this guide's first method seems to detail the same way I did it.

Once you've converted your sound files to mono, import them into FMOD and remake your sounds. You should be able to keep your events like I did, just be careful of your sound bank changing names on you.