Update: I wrote a poem.
FLAC is superior to AIFF and WAVE.
FLAC is a compressed(+), lossless(+), open(+) format.
AIFF and WAVE are uncompressed(-), lossless(+), open(+) formats.
FLAC is also easy to use.
Vorbis is superior to MP3.
Vorbis is a compressed(+), lossy(-), open(+) format.
MP3 is a compressed(+), lossy(-), proprietary(-) format.
See Wikipedia’s comparison of audio formats for more info.
Nikki and the Robots: Story Episodes
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outrageously blatant self-promotion
The “problem” with ogg is that many platforms (flash, ios) support mp3 out of the box, so you can use those “for free”, where as ogg would require a 3rd party lib.
With vm based environment where the low level stuff is implemented natively (e.g. flash, java, python) you want to use as much built-in functionality as you can and avoid implementing cpu-intensive tasks in the higher level language.
Other than that I agree :)
Also forgot to mention that if you use html5 some browsers don’t support ogg in the audio api but support mp3.
My html5 game used OGG music. I think it’s just IE that has problems if I remember correctly, an IE seems to have problems with everything. I made the decision early on that I wasn’t going to support it: other browsers are free and superior in pretty much every way, so people have no excuse for using it :P
I use OGG for music, though I must admit I do use WAVE for sound effects most of the time. SDL seems to load .wav files without making as much fuss as other formats, but I’ll see if I can’t get it working with FLAC :)
Safari doesn’t support it either, and chrome support is partial. Only firefox & opera really support it well, and in the case of the latter only fairly recent versions of opera.
Most platforms support .mov and .AIFF and .wav. I cant seem to be able to open Flac. Is there any way to convert it to another kind
.mov seems irrelevant in this context :). I recommend http://audacity.sf.net/ for conversion.