We are creating a simple sound board, but using a professional sound company. Anyone have some feedback as to what format we can use in an app to playback a sound. .wav, .mp3, .mp4? Also what is the best sampling rate you have used?
You can play 1 mp3 at any time, and on top of that as many wav's as the app can handle at once. We use 48k mp3's for our games' music, btw. Any sample rate will work, but it will use more resources as the bitrate increases. Same with wavs, larger filesizes will use more resources and potentially cause lag. You might want to experiment with using mono wavs instead of stereo if possible, as this will cut the filesize in half.
OpenAL can play back many Wav files at a time. We are using 22khz mono files. AudioQueue can stream 1 music file at a time. MP3 etc You can pre load or stream it in. Streaming gave me a a FPS hit. But it saves ram so a lot of people are doing it. AudioQueue will use the ipods sound CPU to play back the music CPU hits from that should be minimal. Im playing MP3, VBR encoded 126(?) or so bit rate. At least with my music going low had a horrible effect on the dynamic range so you need to play with that.
