What is the smallest audio file format?

Question

I know this is not a specific programming question but I hope someone can give me a suggestion. My applications (iPhone and Blackberry applications) use a lot of audio files. I need a solution for my applications in order to save some spaces.

Is it right that .aac is the most suitable audio format for iPhone? Is it the smallest one? It it also suitable for Blackberry?

Is there any way to make the audio files smaller without losing a lot of quality of the sounds? How about the bitrate, sampling freq and channels? Are they really matter?

Answer 1

AAC is a good format for the iPhone. The iOS is optimized to play AAC.

Yes, things like bitrate, sampling frequency and number of channels are all factors in the audio file's size.

What you should do is take your audio and convert it to different formats with different settings and then just play them on a real device to see if the quality is acceptable.

Sorry, there is no simple answer. Experiment.

Answer 2

Depends on what type of audio you're encoding. For speech, AMR is supported by all major smartphones, and will generally give the smallest file sizes. Quality degredation is noticeable enough that it's not suitable for music, but it's optimized for voice recording (the voice notes app on the BlackBerry uses it as its file format) so it'll give you very nice results with spoken audio.