Best audio file format? « cocos2d for iPhone

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Best audio file format?

(10 posts) (3 voices)

Started 2 years ago by Joe Henry
Latest reply from Joe Henry

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Joe Henry
Member

I'm just wondering what the best settings are for audio files being used with cocosdenshion. Right now I have a background track that plays in my main menu scene. It's two minutes long and is 4.8 MB. The bit rate is 320kbps and the sample rate is 44.100 kHz. It somehow seems to take my frame rate down by 20 frames a second. Any ideas on what I can do to fix this?

Also I have three short .wav files that I play during my game scene. They're each about 1 or two seconds long but they also bring my frame rate down by about 20-30 frames per second.

So my questions are is there something I'm missing here about how these sounds should be formatted? Or could this issue somehow be tied to my background music file? It being too long or something? And what's the best way to save sound files... .wav? mp3? etc...

Cheers!

Joe

Posted 2 years ago #
redsky
Member

Hey Joe,

Are you experiencing this on the device or simu?

You may have already seen this but there is a good best practices section on audio formats for the iphone here (section 7-4)

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/AudioandVideoTechnologies/AudioandVideoTechnologies.html

Are you preloading your sounds up front or are they being loaded for the first time when you call them?

Posted 2 years ago #
Joe Henry
Member

So I saw that they said that uncompressed audio works best for performance and I also found this:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/iPhone/Conceptual/iPhoneOSProgrammingGuide/AudioandVideoTechnologies/AudioandVideoTechnologies.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40007072-CH19-SW28

So I tried out the converter on my background music and it took the file size from 5MB to 21MB on disk which probably isn't good. However, my game does run much smoother now. Does anybody know of a way to keep the size of the files smaller and keep the same performance speed and sound quality?

And no, I'm not preloading the textures... Should I be? does that also help performance?

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

You didn't answer redsky's question about whether your fps measurements are on the simulator or device.

A frame rate drop of 20-30 fps for playing some short sounds is very abnormal.

Posted 2 years ago #
Joe Henry
Member

I didn't see his question... and sorry about the late response. I've only just gotten a chase to test my app using CAF audios files.

The frame rate drop is experienced on the device. Also, I'm wondering how to preload some sounds. The first time I play a sound my whole application pauses while it loads. Is there a way to avoid this?

Sorry again for the late reply.

Posted 2 years ago #
redsky
Member

Joe,

You absolutely want to preload sounds! Otherwise you get that freeze the first time it loads the sound resource.

Go to the tests folder in your cocos download. Then CocosDenshionDemo, DenshionDemo.m.

You can learn how to asynchronously load all your audio from that demo.

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator

@Joe Henry - please be precise about your problem otherwise I can't really help. For starters what device, what OS version and is the device jail broken? Please do a debug build and post the entire CocosDenshion console log. Then do a release build and measure the performance on that. Also please measure performance of background music alone, playing a single sound effect and playing background music in combination with an effect.

ps - the methods for preloading both have names that start with preload e.g. preloadBackgroundMusic.

Posted 2 years ago #
Joe Henry
Member

I'm sorry. I'm using an iPod touch 1g that is not jail broken.

I've messed around some more and the frame rate drop seems as if it may not have been caused by my sound. For example, the first time I loaded my main menu and the background music was playing I got a frame rate of 40 fps. My game wasn't releasing scenes right so if I went to a game scene, then back to the main menu, there would never be a memory drop in there and the frame rate would rise to 60 fps.

I just installed the latest version of cocos so we'll see what happens. Now when I check my scene retain count it returns 1 like it should and not -1 like it was before so that hopefully should fix the memory problem, and I'll just have to see what was causing the frame rate drop.

Steve, you said "the methods for preloading both have names that start with preload e.g. preloadBackgroundMusic."

I haven't been able to find an example of using these methods anywhere and I'm not sure how to get your elaborate demo working in my game. I don't understand where to call the setUpAudioManager method and once you call it, are you good for all your cocos scenes? or do you have to set one up for every scene?
Also would you mind (or anybody) showing me how to preload sound effects using the preload methods?

Thanks for your time, too. I appreciate it!

P.S. All I've been able to find online about cocos denshion is the cookbook. Are there other resources? I'd love to find a good tutorial or something on it.

Posted 2 years ago #
Steve Oldmeadow
Administrator
I assume you are using SimpleAudioEngine, since with CDAudioManager the sounds have to be preloaded.
```
SimpleAudioEngine *sae = [SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine];
if (sae != nil) {
    [sae preloadBackgroundMusic:@"backgroundmuzak.mp3"];
    if (sae.willPlayBackgroundMusic) {
        sae.backgroundMusicVolume = 0.5f;//You'd get this from your config
    }
    [sae preloadEffect:@"sound1.wav"];
    [sae preloadEffect:@"sound2.wav"];
    [sae preloadEffect:@"sound3.wav"];//...and so forth
}
```
The only resources that I know of are the FAQ, the cookbook and the demo. A tutorial would be nice but to be honest I don't have the patience to produce one and am probably not the best person to do it - if someone who is good at writing things like that wants to write one I would be very happy.
Posted 2 years ago #
Joe Henry
Member

Thank you so much! I'll try this out as soon as possible... I had some issues with OpenFeint and the Xcode beta so I had to downgrade and haven't been able to do much coding.

Thanks for your help everybody!

Posted 2 years ago #

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