Create Audio file on iPhone/iPad from many other audio files (mixer) - iphone

I am trying to create something similar like Piano app on the iPhone. When people tap a key, it play a piano note. Basically, there will have only 7 notes (C) at the moment. Each note is a .caf file and its length is 5 seconds.
I do not know if there is any way to save the song user played and export to mp3/caf format? The AVAudioRecord seems only record from the microphone input.
Many thanks

For such an app you probably don't want to record into an audio-file - instead record the note-presses and timings for a much more compact format and then play back the same as if the user was pressing the notes at the recorded times.
If you do want to be able to export an audio file format then you can write a simple mixer which adds together the individual samples from your source samples with the correct offsets and puts the results in your output audio buffer. You should probably also write a very simple compressor so that you keep the sample volume without any distortion caused by 'clipping'. This can be done by dividing down any summed sample above 95% of the maximum sample value. There may also be a way to use OpenAL to do this mixing for you and play back into an audio buffer.

Related

How to record user generated sound output on iPhone

I have a series of sounds that a user will play, rearrange, and edit etc. while using my app. When the user is finished, I want them to be able to save their work and record it to an mp3.
I don't want to play it through speakers and record it with the mic since that will result in low sound quality and interference. I cannot think of any ways of doing this that doesn't require extra hardware and/or a computer.
How can I do this using just their device?
Well, I would say it cant be done with AVFoundation.
My suggestion is to use Audio Units, and transform all your interactions to an audio graph. at some point you set a render notify on the RemoteIO so every time it renders sounds to the speakers you get a callback where you can write it down those frames/packets/data into a file.
I will probably suggest to use AAC(m4a) over MP3. I am not very fond of MP3, and to be honest as far as I know the sdk does not provide encoding to MP3, probably due to licensing issues. I could be wrong though. Check this sample code below, probably the best sample code you will ever find on Audio units on the web.
AudioGraph by Tom Zic

Real time audio recording/analysis on iPhone

I'm building a piece of hardware that sends data into the headphone jack, and I need a way to record short snippets and analyze it quickly (hopefully without having to save the file and reopen for analysis). I have played around with fft and the accelerate frameworks, though I don't think it's exactly what I'm looking for.
I'm wondering mostly if something like this is feasible: record a ~30ms snippet of audio, and then grab an array of floats representing the voltage/(db levels?) throughout the recording. Then I could interpret the data depending on the levels at different ms through the recording. Would something like AVAudioRecorder be able to record at a resolution which I could examine every ms in the recording? Since this will be a repeating process, I'm hoping to keep the cpu down as well.
This is totally doable. Use AudioSession with AudioUnits.

create video from images [duplicate]

I have come across some sample codes where set of images are added to make a QTmovie.
I am targeting this for OS X platform without any QT frameworks.
I have ague idea of creating a file with extension and embed it with appropriate metadata and find a way to insert images and audio in required format. So when the file is created it can simply be played.
I am not sure of what format/extension is better.
pointers are much appreciated.
Without QuickTime (or an equivalent multimedia framework), what you describe is quite a lot of work. Ordinarily, you would use a video compression algorithm (such as H.264) to encode your images into video, and an audio compression algorithm (such as AAC) to encode your audio track. Then you would write these streams into a container file, such as an MPEG-4 file, which interleaves the streams for playback, contains metadata and indexes and so on. Then for playback, you parse the file, decode the video and audio data, and schedule them for playback, taking care to keep them in sync.
QuickTime does all this (and more) for you, and it would be an enormous undertaking to write it all yourself. Is there some reason why you are running on OS X but cannot use QuickTime?
Given the question is tagged with iPhone, why can't you just use QTKit?
If you had to do it from scratch, you could adopt a very simple solution whereby you store your image sequence as a set of JPEG files (but then you would require libjpeg; use raw RGB or PPM if you must), the audio track as a raw WAV data, and then have another file (a text file you define) that stored timing information, so you would simply stream out the audio, and have the frame numbers of the images stored with their corresponding timecode/sample offset. That is a very simple solution that could be made to work without too much effort.
If you give us some more idea of what you are trying to achieve, we could offer some more specific suggestions.
If you want to write a program to do this, you could use Xuggler in Java to do it. It will allow you to save your final video in a format playable by almost any media player.
Start out by gaining an understanding of how video files (e.g. MP4, Quicktime) actually represent audio and video with this Overly Simplistic Guide to Internet Video.
Then, play around with the MediaTool tutorials. You can write programs that make raw images into video files (see this sample code). Finally, to write a program that makes audio and video that are in sync, see this tutorial; it generates a set of images, and makes some audio noise that is timed to change when a ball hits the edge of a box.
Hope that helps.
Art

How can I record the audio output of the iPhone? (like sounds of my app)

I want to record the sound of my iPhone-App. So like someone is playing something on a iPhone instrument and after that you can hear it.
Is it possible without the micro?
Do you mean an App you build yourself? If yes, you could just save the rendered waveform (maybe encoded/compressed to save space) for later playback. (see: Extended Audio File Services, it can write the same AudioBufferList to a file that you would render to the RemoteAudio Unit when playing audio in your Instrument-App)
[Edit: removed comments on recording third-party app audio output ...]
With the AVFoundation you are currently using, you're always working on the level of the sound files. Your code never sees the actual audio signal. Thus, you can't 'grab' the audio signal that your app generates when it is used. Also, AVAudioPlayer does not provide any means of getting to the final signal. If you're using multiple instances of AVAudio player to play multiple sounds at the same time you also wouldn't be able to get at the mixed signal.
Alas, you probably need to use CoreAudio which is a much more low level interface.
I'd like to suggest an alternative approach: Instead of recording the audio output, why not record the sequence of actions together with their time which lead to the audio being played? Write this sequence of events to a file and read it back in to reproduce the 'performance' - it's a bit like your own MIDI sequencer :)

Creating video file from images and audio( pre-recorded )

I have come across some sample codes where set of images are added to make a QTmovie.
I am targeting this for OS X platform without any QT frameworks.
I have ague idea of creating a file with extension and embed it with appropriate metadata and find a way to insert images and audio in required format. So when the file is created it can simply be played.
I am not sure of what format/extension is better.
pointers are much appreciated.
Without QuickTime (or an equivalent multimedia framework), what you describe is quite a lot of work. Ordinarily, you would use a video compression algorithm (such as H.264) to encode your images into video, and an audio compression algorithm (such as AAC) to encode your audio track. Then you would write these streams into a container file, such as an MPEG-4 file, which interleaves the streams for playback, contains metadata and indexes and so on. Then for playback, you parse the file, decode the video and audio data, and schedule them for playback, taking care to keep them in sync.
QuickTime does all this (and more) for you, and it would be an enormous undertaking to write it all yourself. Is there some reason why you are running on OS X but cannot use QuickTime?
Given the question is tagged with iPhone, why can't you just use QTKit?
If you had to do it from scratch, you could adopt a very simple solution whereby you store your image sequence as a set of JPEG files (but then you would require libjpeg; use raw RGB or PPM if you must), the audio track as a raw WAV data, and then have another file (a text file you define) that stored timing information, so you would simply stream out the audio, and have the frame numbers of the images stored with their corresponding timecode/sample offset. That is a very simple solution that could be made to work without too much effort.
If you give us some more idea of what you are trying to achieve, we could offer some more specific suggestions.
If you want to write a program to do this, you could use Xuggler in Java to do it. It will allow you to save your final video in a format playable by almost any media player.
Start out by gaining an understanding of how video files (e.g. MP4, Quicktime) actually represent audio and video with this Overly Simplistic Guide to Internet Video.
Then, play around with the MediaTool tutorials. You can write programs that make raw images into video files (see this sample code). Finally, to write a program that makes audio and video that are in sync, see this tutorial; it generates a set of images, and makes some audio noise that is timed to change when a ball hits the edge of a box.
Hope that helps.
Art