Sound Media Guidelines

This is a section of guidelines for Musicians and Sound Artists to follow in creating, organizing and submitting musical or sound effect media to the WorldForge project. If you have any questions, please use the regular communication channels to ask questions.

License

• All contributed media should be licensed under as many licenses as you like, but the default for all media contributed to the media repo (unless otherwise stated) is to be dual licensed with the GPL v2+ and GFDL v1.1+ license. What does this mean? (artist retains copyright, (and thus also the option to release the art later under additional licenses), but the GPL licensed version remains open, and can be used and modified by others as long as they make their modifications available).

Content Creation Systems (CCS) Production Software/Hardware

• For musical productions use whatever authoring tool you want, but the preference in WorldForge has been to promote the use of FOSS tools such as Tracking Software, Linux Multi-Media Studio, Audacity among many others available. Artists that have contributed to WorldForge have used and are using a variety of software from Free to Professional, you should feel free to use the software you are comfortable with, but it's of outmost importance that you both provide your source materials (.rsn files containing the sequencing data, and special instruments in their needed original format (.wav) for example) as well as the final result (.ogg files).
• I'm not really sure that musical composition with all its variety, software and hardware lends itself easily to selecting one or a few standardized methods of workflow.
• Midi is a good standard for sharing digital transcription, so perhaps this could considered as many composition tools have a Save to MIDI option.

File Formats for Game Ready Song formats

• Ember will support .wav and .ogg file formats. The mp3 format has patent issues and therefore not supported. Converting mp3 to ogg will result in worse quality, then flac to ogg, so you should avoid using mp3. Read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues