Mp3 better than WAV

I've had mp3's playing perfectly fine on my iPhone game.. they also work in the PC runtime... so they should work for you... you shouldn't use wav's for the music XD

I use Audacity (freeware) to resave the mp3 at a lower bitrate, I shaved an extra 1mb off the file size with no noticeable (to me) difference in the sound quality.

MP3s use less space, but if you push a certain # of units out you will need to license it for $5k and up. Honestly you are better to go with WAV just because decoding the MP3 stream is a singleton on the iPhone so performance is not very optimal.

I had no idea about the licensing thing.. can you elaborate?

Guys I said it once in another thread before - there is a perfect wav to mp3 convert tool I love! Its simple and works great: Please login to see this link. Audacity is cool for working with audio files. Converting the files -> wav to mp3 converter

DaveC you should refer to Please login to see this link. for answers to your questions. It depends on a number of variables.

2500 $ per game ! Huh :o
Someone here said Clickteam is paying royalties for MP3 support in MMF : Please login to see this link.
Is this related to the problem ?

The very useful (dont people read these?) ios writeups from Andos mention only paying royalties if your game makes 100,000 or more. Although mp3 licensing mentions it being needed fore games selling 5000 or more copies.

Further, i have seen people suggest that since your mp3s will use apples decoder, that theyve already paid on this behalf.

I've yet to find a real straight answer on the subject. I am also still unclear on what other formats will work in the same manner. Using mp3s and apples decoder frees up ram for your game, will any other formats function in this way?

I wonder why the iOS exporter doesn't offer MMFs great sound compression, which is perfect for Wavs. I don't want to support the Mp3 format and keep in mind that the licensing terms may change. But considering the iOS filesize limits it seems we're forced to use Mp3. Which sucks if you design a game for iOS+Windows, because under Windows you need to rely on codecs to play Mp3. Relying on any 3rd party stuff is always a bad idea.

Why can't we have a simple solution? For Flash and Windows we don't need to use ogg/Mp3 because the compressed Wavs have roughly the same size. Isn't it possible to add this compression to the iOS runtime?

This whole thing could be solved with ogg and/or AAC support in MMF.

MMF supports OGG - it should be playable under the Play Sound action.

Yes, but the iPhone does not : sot he OGG sounds will be converted to wav when building, and will be really huge.

Francois, does the iOS audio system not allow the great Wav compression we know from the other runtimes? The ability to use Wavs for ingame music would help so much when creating cross-platform games.

I dont think the Wav are compressed when built. But Yves has to confirm this.

I mean the Build Option "Compress sounds", which is disabled for iOS. When the Flash runtime was released I tested with some music in ogg and Wav format. In the final build there was only a minor difference in file size, therefore it was acceptable to use Wavs only.

My concern would still be that any other format would not be played using apples decoder, even if acceptable to mmf. Is this correct? Dont non-mp3 sounds use up ram allocated for your game, versus rAm thats always allocated for apples mp3 decoder?

Only the first mp3 is played uses the hardware decoder. Following mp3 uses software decoding. So it takes up processor time. Wav should take less time. So a good approach would be to have the background music as mp3 and sound effects as wav.

That's what I thought. But are there other formats that use hardware decoding?

I guess all the Apple formats (m3a, m3a etc.)

Don't worry about the license thing. The decoder is on Apple's own device, you're playing the MP3 through the iPod interface which is using the iPod's decoder, so I seriously doubt there could be any issues licensing MP3 in indie iOS games.