iPhone compressed audio formats that will play on Windows Media player

Question

I have to record audio on an iPhone that will play back on Windows Media Player, using no non-standard codecs; that is, using no codecs that don't already ship with WMP. (Corporate requirement.) The audio has to go base-64 to a server, so I need to get the audio size as small as possible. Even at 8Kb recording frequency, AIFF files take ginormous amounts of space. I can't seem to find a compressed AIFF format that WMP will swallow.

Answer 1

Best bet is to write WAV files with ulaw or alaw compression (the mFormatId of your AudioStreamBasicDescription would be kAudioFormatULaw or kAudioFormatALaw. Test to see which one gives you the smallest file sizes for your application.

Here's some code to set up an ExtAudioFile instance to write ulaw:

NSArray * docs = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString * docDir = [docs objectAtIndex:0]; 
NSURL * outFile = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:[docDir stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"OutFile.wav"]];
AudioStreamBasicDescription asbd;
bzero(&asbd, sizeof(asbd));
asbd.mSampleRate = 11025; // or whatever
asbd.mFramesPerPacket = 1;
asbd.mChannelsPerFrame = 1;
asbd.mFormatID = kAudioFormatULaw; //or kAudioFormatALaw
ExtAudioFileRef theFile;
err = ExtAudioFileCreateWithURL((CFURLRef)outFile,
        kAudioFileWAVEType,
        &asbd,
        0,
        kAudioFileFlags_EraseFile,
        &theFile);

Hope that helps.

--- ADDED ---

Here are modifications to the SpeakHere sample code to get ulaw compression:

SpeakHereController.mm:116

recordFilePath = (CFStringRef)[NSTemporaryDirectory() stringByAppendingPathComponent: @"recordedFile.wav"];

SpeakHereController.mm:158

recorder->startRecord(CFSTR("recordedFile.wav"));

AQRecorder.mm:192

SetupAudioFormat(kAudioFormatULaw);

AQRecorder.mm:215

XThrowIfError(AudioFileCreateWithURL(url, kAudioFileWAVEType, &mRecordFormat, kAudioFileFlags_EraseFile,
           &mRecordFile), "AudioFileCreateWithURL failed");