How to correctly process WWise Vorbis Audio | Guide + WemTool

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How to correctly process WWise Vorbis Audio | Guide + WemTool

Good evening everybody,

I am sure we have all seen audio in *.wem format before. This is a very common type of audio in games and is made by WWise sound engine. The audio in the .WEM format can either be Vorbis (you may know this as *.OGG) or WAVE audio (*.WAV).

Wems that contain WAV audio can be already compressed by ProFrager's Media Streams Compressor just fine and is not the focus of this guide.

Instead, I would like to explain the best way to compress the Vorbis wems. For normal vorbis audio, we would use ProFrager's OGGRE compressor however ProFrager also made a separate version of OGGRE for WWise vorbis. In order to gain the benefits of this tool, you could follow these steps:

1. Use WW2OGG on your wem file to convert the *.wem file to an *.ogg file.
2. Compress this *.ogg file with the WWise OGGRE encoder.
3. Decompress the compressed file with the WWise OGGRE decoder
4. Patch the decompressed output to the original *.wem file using your patch engine of choice. I like to use HDiffZ since it makes the smallest patches, however XDelta will be sufficient here.

This is a very basic process. However, from reading the above steps - you wil be thinking - how on Earth am I meant to use OGGRE (WWise version) with FreeArc?

The answer is, we don't. Because Oggre WWise can only proccess one file at once and not many files. FreeArc would bundle all of your *.oggs together in $$arcdatafile$$.tmp. Because we cannot use FreeArc for this (it would crash because the decoded output of the compressed *.ogg file DOES NOT MATCH the input file to the encoder), we have to go down a different route. Attempting to individually compress each *.wem file in a game where there could be thousands of wems is a nonsense task, so instead I simplified it.

I would like to introduce WemTool - a wrapper for several tools which will parallel process all of your wem files.

 WemTool [For Vorbis WWise Audio]

 Available Options:

 -e : encode wems
 -d : decode wems

 Example Usage:

 WemTool.exe -e
 WemTool.exe -d

Please note that this is a very simple program and WemTool.exe contains the following tools:

- WW2OGG by hcs64
- MParallel by LoRd_MuldeR
- Oggre WWise by ProFrager
- HDiffZ by sisong

In order to use it, simply drop WemTool.exe into the root of the game folder that contains *.wem files and run it from command line with either encode or decode option. WemTool will compress all the *.wem files possible (it runs recursive) and then delete the successfully compressed wems, leaving a *.ww file and a *.DIFFZ file which then can be decoded by WemTool back into a *.wem. All CPU threads are used. If any *.wem files are left after WemTool has run, it means that they contain Wave audio and you should compress them with MSC instead.

To demonstrate on a sample of *.wem files from the game "Old World":


My apologies for the long read. I hope you understand what has just been explained, but this is certainly a lot more wordy than I would have desired.

Please note that I did little to no coding here, it's Bat2Exe + all aforementioned tools, so all credits here go to ProFrager, LoRd_MuldeR, hcs64 and sisong for their tools which all are used by this program.