This is probably a rather noobish question, but a friend pointed out that I shouldn't use mp3 format for my game as there seems to be some patent issues. I did a quick search from the trust worthy Wikipedia, and got the following, "In September 1998, the Fraunhofer Institute sent a letter to several developers of MP3 software stating that a license was required to "distribute and/or sell decoders and/or encoders". The letter claimed that unlicensed products "infringe the patent rights of Fraunhofer and Thomson. To make, sell and/or distribute products using the [MPEG Layer-3] standard and thus our patents, you need to obtain a license under these patents from us" So yea... is this true? If so, what other format do you guys uses?
All iphone dev use MP3. You don't distribute or sell MP3 encoder or decoder. You use the one from apple API.
No we don't... The format really depends on the purpose. E.g. for music you'll want to take advantage of hardware decoding and use AAC/m4a format (which sounds better at lower bitrates than mp3). For sound fx running through OpenAL or other software mixer use a CAF container.
Something we do is make all our music Mono as the device only has one speaker. Halves your size usage and sounds the same on device (unless you pop in headphones)
You can probably reduce the bitrate too. Unless you do a musical game like me, do what Rogue say. Put the sound in mono. From experience 90% of people won't notice that the sound is in mono.
I am using mp3 when I want to use the hardware on iOS for background music. But my engine is cross platform and I am using ogg files for everything else. Nowdays, the idevice are so fast that if you are doing "simple" games like mine, you can stream everything from an ogg file, so I can have much more complex ambiant environment (and just 1 code for all platforms). JC