From an audio perspective, you need to have a reasonable fidelity level for the sound usedChoosing the sound fidelity level of an application means that you must balance sound quality against the space needed to store the sounds for your application.
From an audio perspective, you need to have a reasonable fidelity level for the sound used
From a resource management perspective, you have a limited amount of storage space for sound files
The best quality sound you can use in the Multimedia PC is CD-DA (44.1 kHz) format. This format is particularly well-suited for music or language applications where nuances of pronunciation are critical. Red Book audio requires the most space on a CD and it uses up the entire bandwidth of a CD-ROM drive to play it. You will always have to pre-load images and other data off the CD before you start playing a Red Book passage.
Audio captured with 16-bits per sample at 11.025 kHz or 22.05 kHz offers very good quality, but requires more support from your application. To play 16-bit data on an 8-bit Multimedia PC, you'll need to use the low-level audio functions documented in the MDK's Programmer's Workbook and Programmer's Reference—your application must include code to convert the data to 8-bit during playback. The benefit to doing this is that your title will sound superior to 8-bit titles when run on a Multimedia PC that support 16-bit audio data.
A good general-purpose sound quality to use is the 8-bit, 22.05 kHz format. If you use good recording techniques, you should be able to get quality comparable to AM radio.
At the low end of the Multimedia PC sound spectrum is the 8-bit, 11.025 kHz sound. Generally, you'll want to use this sampling rate when sound is not a critical or prominent feature of your application. This is adequate for prototyping, applications that use voice narration, or for low-frequency sound effects. However, even the best recordings can sound dull and fuzzy at this sampling size/rate. You'll fare better if you choose recordings that don't use bright, high-pitched sounds.
Whatever format you choose, always start with the highest quality you can record—48 kHz or 44.1 kHz—and then later convert the sound to the lower sampling rates with Microsoft's conversion utilities (WaveEdit). This way you'll always have a high-quality archive file to go back to.