I'm trying to embed music in my XNA game's .exe (with resources) but compiling them as a sound effect stores the music in uncompressed form, which results in a 16 MB .exe.
I can compress my music with wma, and compile it as a song, which unfortunately (in my case) leaves the music as a plain .wma file.
Basically, I want a single standalone .exe, with my content stored as resources. If I could compile a wma song to a single .xnb content file, I could embed that file. I don't know how to do that without uncompressing the music. It might be possible to keep the wma file separate and store it in the resources, but I haven't figured out how to get the .xnb content file to work with it.
In order of preference:
Can I compile a wma to a xnb without decompressing it?
Can I store the wma in the exe resources and load it into a song?
Is there any other way to decrease the size of an exe with embedded music?
EDIT: The comments mentioned using XACT. This seems like a good solution. I have another question. Since the XACT sounds are not loaded with Content.Load, it will not automatically look in the application resources (I have Content set up to do so). Is there a way to load XACT sounds from resources? If not, I will accept having to load content from separate files.