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I did some research and found out that the Opus (Wikipedia) codec might be worth a try for the game's sound files. Currently, all 0 A.D. music files are encoded with 160 kbit/s using OGG Vorbis. With Opus, it would be possible to encode them with 96 kbit/s, where the threshold for transparency is for this format (Source). Maybe they could even be encoded with 64 kbit/s (At least, I don't hear the difference). Several ambient sounds might be encoded with even lower bit rates (for speech, 32 kbit/s is sufficient using Opus (see link above)). The sound files currently make up about 150 MB of the installer. The savings could amount to about 50-60 % by encoding with Opus at a lower bitrate, which would result in a ~75 MB smaller download. Doing a quick re-encode of all music files with 96 kbit/s VBR, I obtained 51 MB (as opposed to originally 109 MB). One big advantage of the Opus format, apart from the better encoding quality, is a very low latency (~25 ms). It can also be packed into OGG containers (so the configuration files don't need to be re-written). A possible downside is that decoding Opus files takes more CPU power than OGG Vorbis (I am not a programmer though, so I cannot quantify that). I attached a few 0 A.D. music files in Opus format as samples (encoded from the .wav files in trac). Ammon-Ra_96_kbits.opus Honor_Bound_2014_96kbits.opus Ammon-Ra 64 kbits.opus Honor_Bound_2014 64 kbits.opus Edit: VLC Player can open the files.

I encountered 2 users who reported this problem in #0ad, one (several weeks ago) was running Windows. the other was today, and I don't know which OS he had.

What kind of music player can I play your attached files with?