Music and sound

What's the best format to get the highest quality and longest track length in the smallest file size? Ideally I'd find something to convert mp3s to that format (I have songs from my favorite band Silvercord that I'd like to be playing at the start up screen of the game, but in mp3 they are like 6 MB apiece :()

I'm looking into fmod but cannot find mp3 to fmod convertor

EDIT: If I could just somehow decrease the mp3 file size and play it somehow that would be helpful too. Could it be converted to wav and them compressed? Music and sound isn't really my thing yet.

EDIT1: found a program to output compressed wav files, but it is still 15.1 mb, is there anyway to save the new compressed wave file as a new wave file with lesser quality (and filesize)

sizeof((ANY COMPRESSION).WAV) >= sizeof((samefile).MP3);

I've never seen any compressed wav file smaller than the mp3 version of it. Thats why mp3 is so populer becuase of its compression/quality. fmod would probably be good, but ive not seen any mp3->fmod converters.

I say stick to MP3 files (compressed ones), they are a good choice.

yes, .wav is generally larger than .mp3... but there's always midi's!!!

You could convert the mp3s to .wav, download a copy of RazorLame, and re-encode them to .mp3 at a lower quality...but you'll hear it. It's possible to make them quite small, though. The better the quality, the bigger the file. Midis are great, until they get repetitive :)

blackrat I would be interested in doing that (recording at a lower sample rate is what you mean?)

With that program is it possible to only encode parts of the song? I would like to record perhaps 30 seconds of a song from Silvercord (the band not my other name) and have it in a continuous loop. My ideal filesize range for each sound/song is less than 512KB. I have no experience with doing this type of thing, I think the sampling rate is 44.0KHz default (for wave). What would you suggest I set it to when I encode it to mp3 (for maximum quality with the lowest filesize). What bitrate?

Thanks.

MusicMatch Jukebox can convert an MP3 to any quality directly, without converting to WAV format first.

Have you looked into Ogg Vorbis? I have never used it b4 but I heard it has great quality and is very small.

OGG Vorbis is what Unreal Tournament 2003 uses for all of its music. It's able to squeeze a 3-minute song into about 1.5MB, while sounding wuite good.

Do you know how many Kbps that 1.5 MB file is?