Should CD tracks be in a specific format?

SiFi270 · Post by **SiFi270** » Sun Mar 18, 2018 3:49 pm

So a little while ago I bought the extended Doom 64 soundtrack in .ogg format and assembled it all into a file I could load with Retribution, but as one might expect, the file in question ended up being HUGE. It was only today I realized it might be more efficient to burn the tracks to a CD and then make a simple mapinfo patch that loads the CD tracks. But it seems .ogg was the wrong format for that (and I'm beginning to realize it may have been the wrong format for my first method anyway), so can anyone recommend a better format to re-download the soundtrack in, or perhaps point out to me what else I may be doing wrong?

wildweasel · Post by **wildweasel** » Sun Mar 18, 2018 4:08 pm

I wouldn't advise trying to burn this soundtrack to CD Audio - the runtime of the tracks (not including the BONUS ones) is 6:23:17 - 6 hours, 23 minutes, 17 seconds. You'd need six 72-minute CD-Rs to fit all of that. Remember, a lot of these tracks approach 20 minutes in length, so of course the result is going to be huge. OGG is probably the best format you can hope for - if you are really itching to save space on it, you could probably fairly safely convert the OGGs down to an even lower bit-rate, like going from 44 KHz to 22, at a bitrate of 64 or even 48 kbps.

Post by **Caligari87** » Sun Mar 18, 2018 7:17 pm

CD audio is lossless (think WAV or FLAC sizes), so they're going to be bigger than OGG. And like Weasel said, you'd need six CDs for it since CDs record based on time, not filesize. Converting them down won't make them fit on one CD.

SiFi270 · Post by **SiFi270** » Mon Mar 19, 2018 4:16 am

I guess I didn't make it clear in my original post but at that point I'd already burned the .ogg files to a CD, or rather a DVD, which at the time I didn't think would make much difference but now I'm guessing that was the real reason GZDoom couldn't find the tracks. I guess I'll just stick to the big .pk3.

Post by **Caligari87** » Mon Mar 19, 2018 7:03 am

Yeah, you can't just put the files on the disc. You have to actually create it as an audio CD, which uses a unique format, so the burning program generally converts the files as it burns them. I don't think audio DVD has the same kind of wide support audio CD does, so that probably wouldn't work even if you found a program to do it.

ZDoom