ABSTRACT
This chapter builds upon concepts previously introduced to illustrate and explain advanced audio stream optimisation techniques by platform and genre. It notes special considerations for consoles, PCs, web and mobile devices, giving detailed examples of the setup for Burnout 3 music and crash streams, Club Football’s commentary and crowd roars, and the radio, music and cinematic streaming in Grand Theft Auto 4 and 5. It contrasts console implementations of Colin McRae Rally 5 ambiences and speech, with and without a hard drive, Race Driver GRID’s interleaved interactive music layers, pit radio and top-resolution graphics streams on DVD and Blu-ray and the commentary and crowd audio in Brian Lara Cricket 2007, straddling console generations with very divergent hardware capabilities.
Concepts: interleaved stream file and buffer structures, streaming system processor threads, layers of buffering, codec, channel count and buffer size interactions.
Planar audio: group lengths, frames and strides, block sizes, loop alignment and glitchless rewinding, stream bank selection and alternation, bank and stream memory allocations compared, sharing the drive with non-audio systems, dynamic bank swapping, instantly starting streams with pre-roll stubs, variable, constrained and average bit rate streams, mobile music streams, co-operating with user-selected music, sample rate selection, smoothing spikes in decoder activity.
