Quote:Original post by BloodWarrior
Heyas
Looking for advice:

Since when programing in mobile phones we are quite limited to the size of the application jar (in J2ME at least) i was wondering how you guys handle the sounds?

I mean a mid file is going to be really small and will allow you some freedom of sound for a background track or similar. It wont however allow you much on the scene of proper sound effects like explosions and voices (i pretty sure about this)

I stick to midis on the majority of handsets because a lot of phones out there do not support anything other than that. For the handsets that support other formats I generally stick with wav, or qcelp.

Quote:Original post by BloodWarrior
So I was thinking of using mp3's with a really low quality to save space.

What do you guys use? do you stick to midi files?
is there a performance loss using mp3?
should wav be better?
use a single file for all sounds or several?
etc

Yours Truly
K

Sound, unfortunately is a real problem with mobile phones. Inconsistencies in the implementations of the JVM on a per-handset basis makes it real tricky to get consistent audio across a wide range of handsets. To overcome the inconsistencies and problems, I have a bulk of midi sounds that I am using and I also have one combined midi file of all the single files. What this allows me to do is swap between the types when I know there is a problematic handset.

Quote:Original post by BloodWarrior
I mean a mid file is going to be really small and will allow you some freedom of sound for a background track or similar. It wont however allow you much on the scene of proper sound effects like explosions and voices (i pretty sure about this)

There is also SMAF, which is a type of MIDI that includes it's own samples (I think). Most new phones support this format and you can get effects and voices out of it while keeping the size of the files small.

shmoove

Hiya,

I'm a J2ME music composer / sound designer and I've worked with many companies who produce J2ME for their audio needs. You're right in thinking MIDI is pretty crappy for audio spot FX - it certainly is, and it's not that great for music either! The YAMAHA SMAF formats (*.mmf) are often found to be a better alternative to MIDI where it is supported (Samsung mainly). It is still 'polyphonic' based, in the sense that it utilizes the handset's synthesizer chip and thus keeps filesizes pretty much the same as MIDI. Where it differs from MIDI though is that you have greater access to the synthesizer chip. There are free downloads available from the Yamaha website which gives access to the 'audio envelope' of the chip, thus allowing some degree of audio modelling of rudimentary sound effects. The later versions of this format due also allow the inclusion of digital audio and compresses it reasonably well. For none Yamaha chips it is still touch and go, with a combination of MP3 and WAV working best. Smartest thing to do is to experiment with sample rates and bit-resolutions to see what sounds good at the lowest filesize. Always down-sample to mono as stereo is just a waste of valuable memory.

Hope this helps.