Mp3 better than WAV

[DavidN]

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

[Francois]

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

[JoKa]

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.

[Francois]

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

[JoKa]

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.

[jregork]

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?

[Francois]

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.

[jregork]

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

[Francois]

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

[DistantJ]

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.