We're creating a range of apps that record user's voice for a wide range of applications. Users can register their ideas, or describe a scene, or give educational tips and notes to someone else.
We need to choose a file format that satisfies these conditions:
- Better to be playable natively in Android, iOS and web
- Better to reduce the cost of encoding-decoding
- Better to reduce the cost of development (we're not sound experts)
- Storage is not a big deal, so compression is not important, but network traffic IS a big deal, so for that reason better to be as compact as possible
The most obvious choice coming to mind is MP3, but to our surprise, MP3 encoding is not supported in Android Studio out of the box.
We searched and tried to find best practices for this, and again, to our surprise there is not much written in spite of huge usage of sounds and voices everywhere.
For example, in this post it's written that MP3 is the most used file format, and then ACC. But we're totally stranger with AAC.
So, what audio format is natively supported in all medias, both for recording and playing back?
The file format can be .AAC, is compressed, compatible with iOS, Web and Android (3.1 or higher) and is developed by Nokia and Sony (This last one is extra information).
You can see at wikipedia all its compatible OS: AAC Wikipedia
It is compatible with WebOS.