Compressed audio for iPhone iTGB?

#1 Right, ogg is no option.
would need to have mp3 / aac compression for the iphone build only as the needed licenses are present on the iphone to playback the stuff

#2 So is there any solution to have a game with music?
a 3 minutes .wav file is about 40Mb

#3 There is no solution at the moment, other than to reduce the amount of music you use.

#4 What sound format did you use in Beryllium ? is it just .wav? how long is it? how big is the file?

#5 Just for future reference: keep in mind in your plannings, that the iphone only allows a single compressed sound to be played!
So even with compressed sound, you can only have your background tune that way, the rest must remain uncompressed.
(and this compressed playback comes at considerable costs on the cpu time end)

#6 Eyal - I used .ogg music in Beryllium (on PC) - which doesn't work on iPhone. When converted to .wav it takes up 22Mb even in mono, which means it just doesn't fit.

#7 I have a feeling that nothing is going to fit using .wav
my 50sec (4.5Mb) song is taking more space than all my textures altogether (4Mb) which makes the zip compressed app 12Mb :( no 3G for my game right now. I think I prefer no music rather than no 3G.

I wonder if anyone has figured out how to use .mp3 since right now we can make cool games with no music.

#8 There is one other option that some of us remember from making games in the "old" days (the 90's). We have reduced the quality of our sounds and music to save size. For instance, try making your sounds 8bit, 11khz, mono to save size. We aren't happy about it, but this is our approach so far.

#9 @Eyal - do you, or anyone, know if Apple's 10MB limit for 3G download is the uncompressed game, or do they allow it zipped. We haven't gotten to that point with Apple, and I don't know how their installer works. If it is 10MB zipped, then we are going to breathe a huge sigh of relief!

#10 I was gonna ask the same question. I googled it the other day and found a post somewhere with the same question.
I think it was the Unity CTO that answered the question and said that the 10Mb limitation is for the zip compressed app which is great news (if it's true). Unfortunately I'm still on 12Mb (zipped) and considering getting rid of the music altogether.
I'll try your suggestion though. I already lowered the quality and using Mono, but gonna give it another shot.

#11 Sweet 8bit , 11khz did the job. and you can still recognize the song :)
Thanks Warthog, my zip is now under 10Mb.
Now lets hope that it really is 10Mb limitation for the zip file, not the app.

#12 You're welcome, I'm glad that made the difference! And I REALLY hope you the 10MB limit is for a zipped file too! It would make sense that Apple's installer would send a zipped file to keep data transfer as low as possible. We've had to lower some sounds to 8bit 5.5khz to reduce size, but if we can zip the whole thing we can bump some stuff back up.

Just as a fun note, in the "old days" ('90s again) 8bit 11khz was considered good sound. My how far we've come.

#13 The future is here.
2d games with 8bit sound and 8bit images on a 480*320.
But you download them over the 3G network. how cool is that :)

#14 I'm 100% with you on keeping it under 10mb. If you can't download it over 3G your going to lose ALOT of potential customers, impulse buys etc. I am also going to keep my game under 10mb no matter what it takes.

#15 Hi, I have what could be good news on the Compressed Audio front! That is, if Garage Games sees the wisdom and implements it.

It is true that the iphone can't handle more than 1 mp3 or aac compressed file at a time, but on further reading, you can have any number of audio streams (I'm sure within reason) that are compressed in IMA4. Now those of us who did games and multimedia in the 90's know this compression format well. You get about 4 to 1 compression and it sounds pretty darn good.

I think this is the format that we should lobby Garage Games to support, as it could be used for overlapping sound effects, music etc with very little overhead addition (according to Apple).

#16 I strongly support the idea. I will be happy enough with 1 compressed sound for music but I'll take more if it's possible.
I had to resample all my audio to 8bit 11khz and you can definitely hear the noise especially using headphones. There is also an annoying noise at the end of each sfx which sounds like sombody dropped the microphone in a concert.

#17 I don't know if this will help, but if your wave file is that long you might want to see if you can convert it to midi (Get a music major to do it for you). Although the torque engine doesn't have the midi support its an easy extension to the engine. I had to do this for a mac and pc game that I worked on a while ago with TGB, and it worked out pretty well.

#18 As for the compression: Apple does not use the ultra compression profile for the iPhone (anymore - 2.0 did which is why it took hours to install 100mb apps like their own poker), so be aware that the final size will be far more towards what you have after compilation than what you have after OSX compress.

#19 What type of software do you all recommend to do these conversions (hopefully freeware) on OSX?

#20 For the compression from what and to what, which requires software other than garageband that comes with each OSX 10.5