Music for Wii

[locash]

anyone have any links or forums on Wii audio and music. does the wii have its own engine? do you have to write tracker files for it? can it play wav's? I have a new wii project coming up and I have no clue. thanks.

[David (plogue)]

Hello, i would talk to the technical heads at the game development house about the audio engine they are using, but the WII hardware is fully capable of many layers of uncompressed PCM audio at once. (although the final audio mix is Dolby Pro Logic II, matrixed in stereo)

Since the WII media is a 4.5 GB DVD, you have plenty of room there, so its mostly a matter of the engine that the game company is using, and how much space they want to allocate for music, but my feeling is that most music on wii is mp3/ogg compressed stereo.

Cheers

[locash]

thats great news! thanks so much.

[groovyone]

It really depends if you're writing for WiiWare or a shelf game.

Shelf Games will use streaming music most likely - unless you need non-flat-file audio like midi or tracker based for specific technical reasons like adaptive music.

Tracker and Nintendo's own format would be used more on WiiWare titles where size is an issue. At that you'd need to speak with your developer on the technical constraints of the format. It also depends which audio engine they're using - Nintendo's own, WWise, FMOD, CriWare.. etc.

[David (plogue)]

It really depends if you're writing for WiiWare or a shelf game.

Ah right WiiWare.. havent bought one of those yet, put all my credits on the virtual console

[Symbiotic]

Most audio on Wii is actually encoded as GCADPCM - a proprietary format that gives you about a 3.5/1 compression ratio, but is decoded in hardware. Nintendo's proprietary tools, as well as middlware such as FMOD or WWise all support using this protocol.

MP3 or Ogg are possible, but unlikely in most situations given that they would need to be decoded in software, which would compete with all of the other engine-side CPU needs.