A fast, easy to use, free, and community supported 2D game engine
I'm not quite certain which way to go. I can either choose to use mp3's in my app, and thus making it 3.3 MB big and forcing users to go iPhone OS 3, or I could use caf-files instead making it 6.66 MB (lol?) but that would allow people with iPhone OS 2 use the app.
Any suggestions?
(If I got this right, and as you might already know, iPhone OS 2 doesn't support decompression of mp3's.)
bradparks
Member
You can use MP3's as background music in iPhone OS 2.2 at least... Cocos Denshion can play background mp3 music and it works in 2.2.
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/wiki/doku.php/cocosdenshion:faq
and this page shows how to do common tasks with Cocos Denshion:
http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/wiki/doku.php/cocosdenshion:cookbook
but maybe you mean mp3's as sound effects?
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
^ You should have followed bradparks advice and looked in the Wiki:
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
^Ok, sorry. FYI saying something is a caf file doesn't tell us the audio format. It could be IMA4, it could be wave or it could be mp3. Caf is just a wrapper around some other audio format. Given you were asking how to convert wave to aiff I assumed your caf files were wave format.
If you are using IMA4 that is the best compression you can get for effects that is backwards compatible. What is wrong with 6.66 Mb? Also did you make sure your sounds were mono?
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, I'm just asking whether it's better to go for smaller size or backwards compatibility.
As a matter of fact, I don't know if they're stereo or mono. Unless the compression makes them mono or something, which I doubt, they're stereo. How do I convert to mono?
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
I don't know what is better, personally I would go for backwards compatibility but that is based on my belief that at least 1 million devices would still be running 2.2.1 or older. Some developers aim to get their app under 10Mb so that it can be downloaded over 3G so 6.66Mb is well under that limit.
afconvert allows you to specify the number of channels but I'd recommend using a tool like Audacity or Sound Forge to create a mono version of your sound as simply taking the left or right channel may not be ideal.
Thanks, I used audacity.
I just noticed my caf files have some distrubing static in the "background", which makes this even harder to decide now.
the mp3s ended up being 1.2 MB, and the cafs 2.2 MB so there really isn't much of a difference. But the quality is far better on the mp3s.
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
What about using a mix of IMA4 and wave? Use wave for sounds that are played often or where the reduced quality of the IMA4 files is noticeable.
Since I decided to incorporate FBConnect in my game, I'm now using Iphone OS 2.2 again. Why? Well, as it turns out, FBConnect doesn't run properly on iPhone OS 3.0. So, I had to choose between iPhone OS 3.1 or somehow solve the size issue and go to iPhone OS 2.2.
So, which would it be? Well, iPhone OS 3.1 was pretty much out of the question. 3.0 was kinda of okay. I was not happy about it, but I thought it would be fine. 3.1 however, that would seriously limit the user base.
So instead I decided I'd solve this. How did I do that? I decided to go with wav's. Gzipped wavs. That way I managed to get the app to a size of about 8 MBs (for the .app). And I think (but I'm not quite sure) that the file that will be in the app store will be even smaller, since the file you upload to Apple is compressed. That file is 6 MB. So it's all good. :)
You can see my gzip implementation here (scroll down a little bit):
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1588861/zlib-iphone-files-get-crap-in-beginning
Also, the issue I was having with crackling sound went away with the usage of wavs.
:D
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