Audio Style Guide

Audio file formats

Audio files are by far the largest files in Threadbare: you can only compress audio so far before the human ear can hear the loss of quality, whereas the visual art style compresses very well, scene files and scripts are relatively small, and we do not use video files.

Godot has excellent documentation on importing audio samples; in Threadbare we follow the recommendations on that page.

Sound effects

Sound effects should be submitted in WAV format. WAV is an uncompressed lossless audio format, but Godot compresses the files during export. 16-bit samples at 44 kHz is plenty.

Each sound effect should be short - typically 1-2 seconds at most.

To reduce the file size of WAV files:

• If they are stereo but both channels have the same data, use mono.
• Remove silence or almost inaudible parts from the beginning or end of tracks.

Music

Please use Ogg Vorbis if available, or MP3 otherwise. The bitrate should average roughly 128kbps – in Ogg Vorbis, this corresponds to quality level 3 or 4.