Audio wav vs mp3. mono vs stereo.

Hey all. I have a question about audio assets, which I intend on creating and sharing.

Do you prefer your music assets as wav or mp3?

What about sound effects? - Do you prefer wav or mp3? Also mono or stereo? Stereo for atmosphere tracks and mono for incidentals such as swords?

Also, do you like your sfx dry, and add reverb later yourself in Unity?

Finally, for footsteps and automatic weaponry, do you prefer one-shots (round robin) or loops? Perhaps one-shots for slower paced actions and loops for faster e.g running, etc.

Thanks for any replies!

 

I will answer just the SFX format part. Absolutely no one should ever use mp3 for sound effects in Unity. Since they have to be decoded, it takes about 80x as long for it to start playing (vs a wav file). Thats acceptable for music probably because there's usually one playing at a time. Playing mp3s is bad for performance and your frame rate will suffer if you use them for SFX, so don't. It will sound latent also.

 

To follow up on jerotas importing audio as mp3 to Unity is also doubly useless as Unity uses Vorbis as a compression format.

So if you want to save space you can set your files to be imported as vorbis - but they should always start lossless like a wav file so Unity can handle the compression depending on the import settings.

 

You guys are necro-ing. At the time I spoke about mp3 (2017) it was an option. Plus I support Unity versions way back to 4.5 in my Master Audio plugin.

Thanks for letting me know that mp3 no longer shows up. I'll check if the same problems are present with Vorbis and post back.