Talk:Audio and Music

I'm not sure how formal this whole effort is in terms of rules / guidelines, but I figure I should take a minute to explain how I intend to organise this page. If anyone has a better system I'm happy to talk about implementing that instead.

We're obviously going to have massive trouble with ambiguity, given the relatively small number of filenames and the vast number of different kinds of files (to pick just one example, a ".ps" file might be a PostScript document or an Amiga module created by Paul Shields).

For the Audio section, as you can see, I've picked up from whoever started it and kept on with the format FILE EXTENSION (Brief Description). For the most part, I intend to create new pages simply at FILE EXTENSION. When ambiguity arises, I've been turning FILE EXTENSION into a disambiguation page and creating new pages using Brief Description, then altering the links on the main page to "Brief Description|FILE EXTENSION" - see "PSF" for example.

Anway, that was boring, but I thought I should explain my thinking. --Halftheisland (talk) 19:56, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm functioning as Final Editor on this project (unlike most Wikis), so there's a solid voice and less time spent bickering. Your system makes sense, and that's how we've been doing it for everything. The intent is to use Categories to help people coming in from sideways issues, like "I have a pile of cartridges, what is on these" or "I have a floppy disk, what kind of floppy disk could it possibly be".

--Jason Scott (talk) 22:46, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Sounds good. Any chance you could knock together some basic editing guidelines for us, Jason? I've been limiting myself to just basic scaffolding at this point, imitating what you had already put up. -- Rhetoric X (talk) 22:50, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I was wondering what the feeling is on pulling in extant documents and wikifying them? I've been linking to various file format specs, but I'm concerned that those links have an expiry date. It would be nice to take them and stick them in a sub-page (e.g. S3M/Specification) just so we've got a backup. ETA: This has been clearly addressed in the FAQ --Halftheisland (talk) 02:16, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Worth noting that there's a separate category for music files, and that many of these formats seem to be more like music files than audio files. MOD being one example but there are many more.

I think this is definitely something that will need sorted shortly - for now, I have literally hundreds more formats to add many of which I am unsure of beyond that they contain audio / music data of some kind. For that reason, I'm going to keep adding them here for consistency - we can always move them to the appropriate section later on. --Halftheisland (talk) 20:53, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree with the notion that audio files should be separated from music files, eventually. There's room for an even finer categorization, audio stream, sample formats (such as xi, rex and other containing specific metadata), modules (self contained files containing samples), music software documents (predominantly note data, eg mid, or Cubase etc documents), music files for specific hardware, not containing samples (nsf, gbs, sid etc). --Nitro2k01 (talk) 22:42, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Audio formats, container formats and codecs

I am a bit confused how to handle the differences between these. Since this wiki is about file formats they should obviously be the main focus. There are a lot of audio compression formats, some of them come with their own container formats (e.g. FLAC) and other use standardized container formats (e.g. Vorbis uses OGG and AAC uses MP4). There are also codecs that look like they come in their own container but they only fool you (e.g. Speex uses the .spx extension which really is an OGG container). Should codecs that don't have their own container format be in the list? It kind of make sense since they are also a binary format that is part of a container format as a chunk or bitstream (or what you want to call it). I am also thinking about how to organize formats with multiple extensions (e.g. ATRAC uses .aa3, .oma and .at3). Comments and suggestions? --PN (talk) 19:38, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Game formats

I've organised these as best I can based on http://vgmstream.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/vgmstream/readme.txt?revision=912&view=markup. It seems likely that these are all variants of one or two standard audio formats with different extensions, but vgmstream does appear to load them in slightly different ways, so I thought it would be best to at least note their existence for now. Halftheisland (talk) 15:22, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Because I forgot to give a summary - the Amiga stuff was organised based on http://www.exotica.org.uk/wiki/UnExoticA/Games_By_Format. Some of these probably belong in "Trackers" rather than "Game", as they were used for demos as well. I'll organise those as I go through them. Halftheisland (talk) 14:01, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Also, I haven't really been following what's going on outside this section - do we have a set system for adding pages to multiple categories? Last time I tried using the infobox it looked quite messy. Some of these formats belong in multiple categories - id Software Music Format, for example, belongs in at least two high-level categories - "Category:Audio and Music" and "Category:Game data files" - and two sub-categories - "Category:Game audio and music" and "Category:Musical instrument control". Depending on how we're using categories, it may also belong in a sub-sub-category and a sub-sub-sub-category ("Category:Hardware specific" and "Category:AdLib Sound Cards" respectively). Halftheisland (talk) 14:08, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

The categories can be multiple and parallel, but the infoboxes do seem to be designed for a single hierarchical ontology. Now, whether the same article ought to be linked in several of the ontological menus is an interesting question. Perhaps they should, but then the infobox should be given only the major category of the ontology in which it fits, while all the others appear in the Category: section at the bottom. Dan Tobias (talk) 14:15, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Amos Basic Konverter (.ambk)

Is there actually any such file format as "Amos Basic Konverter" with a .ambk extension? I reached it while trying to fill in the redlinks here, but can't find anything on it; we've already got the AMOS Memory Bank, which uses an "AmBk" tag within the format, but its extension is .abk. It's connected with AMOS BASIC, a variant of the BASIC programming language that's documented at AMOS BASIC tokenized file. And I think Konverter is some sort of software that... konverts stuff? But is there an actual .ambk file format? Dan Tobias (talk) 15:10, 8 October 2021 (UTC)

There is a program named either AMOS Music Konverter or AMOS Basic Konverter (or maybe those are two different things?). (References: [1] [2] [3]) But I can't find a copy of it. It produces files in some form of "AMOS music bank", but I don't know how distinct it is from other AMOS Music Bank varieties.

I found no evidence for the .ambk extension. I suspect it should be .abk, but can't confirm. -Jsummers (talk) 18:11, 9 October 2021 (UTC)

Ben Replay

Another oddball Amiga format listed here that I can't find any evidence of; is there such a thing as a "Ben Replay" format with a .ben extension? Dan Tobias (talk) 19:56, 5 December 2021 (UTC)