Well, first of all, I'd take all that information with a grain of salt. The last time I tried to figure out Goober's music.tbl instructions, they didn't make any sense given how it should work, and when I checked the code, I only saw a partial relation in how it actually did work. That was awhile back though, and to be fair, Goober's instructions may have worked at some point in time.
Second of all, I think you're confusing bitrate with the bits per sample, because I did a text search on that page and don't see 'rate' anywhere.
Here goes...
Description of terms
Sample - A 'sample' is a measure of sound, a snapshot of it, if you will. Think of it as a frame in an animation
Sample Rate - The number of samples per second. The higher this is, the more samples you have, and thus the better sounding your sound file is. Music may be specified in hertz or kilohertz. A good-quality sounding file will generally be about 44100hz, or 44.1khz, which means that in one second, approximately 44 thousand samples are played.
Bits per sample - How much data each sample contains. Sizes are usually 8 bits or 16 bits, and in professional audio circles, up to 24 bits or more. The larger this is, the more range each sample has. This is not to be confused with bitrate; they are completely different.
Bitrate - Bitrate is used for compression algorithms. Basically what the bitrate means is that X bytes of data will be used to store information in a second. This is akin to varying the compression numbers on a JPEG image. 128-192kbps is generally regarded as CD-quality compression for OGG and MP3. However, with variable bitrate files, the encoder will actually remove sound data that would be inaudible or barely noticeable to the human ear.
Measure - A measure is not really a technical term, but a music term, and for Freespace purposes, it means a section of music. If you had a one-minute piece of music, the beats per minute could be identical as the number of measures in the wave. For a 2 minute file, it could be 2 x BPM. However, it really depends on the piece of the music. The reason Freespace2 wants this, is that it'll assume that the end of a measure is a graceful point to transition to the next song. (At least, that's my understanding of it)
How to use them
I've attached two images to this post, both are the output from a foobar2000 properties window. The first is for an OGG, the second is for a wave. Note that the OGG file does not list the bits per sample. All OGG files are decoded at 16 bits per sample in fs2_open, regardless of their bitrate; this is something that you specify within the program itself that's playing the OGG, rather than the file.
All that follows is based in an ideal world, where the TBL functions do exactly what they're supposed to.
Num measures
This is really up to your ear, because it's completely dependant on the music. For "Don't Panic", I'm going to throw out an arbitrary value that every measure should last 5 seconds. So, I use the formula
Total Length / Sample Length = Number of measures
Doing a bit of rounding, for "Don't Panic", I get:
135 / 5 = 27 measures
Samples per measure
If you already know the measure length, you can just do:
Sample Rate x Measure Length = Number of Samples
So for the OGG:
44100 * 5 = 220500 samples
Final Note
If for whatever reason, you know exactly how many measures you have in a file, but not how many samples, you can use the number of samples (just under the grey header for the second section)
Num Samples / Num Measures = Num Samples per Measure
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