I recently started fooling around with converting our sound files with xact while my friend does some programming but I have a couple of questions before I go any farther.

1. After adding files to the sound bank and building it, I used a compression of 60, is there a way to test the xma file on my pc to check the sound quality? If not how could I build the wav bank with xact so it is playable on PC?

2. If I were to add more than one file to the wav bank how would you differentiate between each wav within the bank? For our puzzle game it will consist of stages, a background song looping for each stage, so should each wav bank consist of a single wav file and be used for each stage or could we put the music for all of the stages in a single wav bank.

1. There is currently no way to hear your XMA-encoded sounds on PC. If we all ask Microsoft really nicely, they might put xmaencode.exe (which makes that possible) into XNA Game Studio 3.0, rather than only in the XDK - but maybe there are legal reasons why they can't. So you'll have to audition on 360, I'm afraid.

2. You can (and probably should) happily put all your wavs into one, or just a few, wavebanks. Remember - each cue references sounds, each sound references tracks, and each track references waves. Those waves can come from any wavebank.

Xact 3.0 supports XMA now so if you install the DX SDK you can probably audition the XMA compressed files through there. But of course you will still need to maintain Xact 2.0 files for XNA Game Studio.

The ZMan [MVP/Moderator]:

Xact 3.0 supports XMA now so if you install the DX SDK you can probably audition the XMA compressed files through there. But of course you will still need to maintain Xact 2.0 files for XNA Game Studio.

A minor clarification: xWMA is the new kid on the block in XACT3/XAudio2 for both platforms, XMA is still 360 only.