Month: July 2012

This link is useful for understanding sound formats.

For all the sounds that I record, I use .caf format. For pre-recorded sounds I converted them all from .aiff to .m4a using afconvert—a developer tool from the command line. You can also use iTunes.

Here’s the script I use for afconvert. I adopted if from one I found on Sparrow.org. afconvert will convert to lots of formats, but the Apple Lossless makes the smallest file size for me.

#!/bin/bash
# http://www.sparrow-framework.org/2010/06/sound-on-ios-best-practices/
# Reset the field separator to : instead of space so all of the file will be converted
IFS=:
for i in ~/Sounds/*; do
  
  # creates sound.aifc (IMA4 compression, MONO)
  #afconvert -f AIFC -d ima4 -c 1 $i

  # creates sound.m4a (Apple Lossless compression)
  afconvert -f m4af -d aac -q 127 -c 1 $i
done

This is a simple method that I use to copy a file from the app bundle to the Documents directory. You can’t modify files in the app bundle, but you can modify them if they are in the Documents directory.

- (void)createResultsDocument {
    
    NSString *documentsDirectory = [self applicationDocumentsDirectory];
    NSString *sourcePath = [[[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath] stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"HTML_header.html"];
    
    NSDateFormatter* dateFormatter = [[NSDateFormatter alloc] init];
    [dateFormatter setDateFormat:@"yyyy-MM-dd"];
    NSString *todaysDate = [dateFormatter stringFromDate:[NSDate date]];
    NSString *resultsFileName = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"MPResults_%@.html",todaysDate];
    NSString *destinationPath = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:resultsFileName];
    NSError *error;
    
    [[NSFileManager defaultManager] copyItemAtPath:sourcePath 
                                            toPath:destinationPath
                                             error:&error];
    NSLog(@"The copy error is: %@", error);
    
    // Check that it worked.
    NSURL *resultsURL = [NSURL fileURLWithPath:destinationPath];
    NSLog(@"The resultsURL is: %@", resultsURL);
}