450 CHAPTER 12: Digital Audio: Providing Aural Feedback for UI Designs Using SoundPool
The installer dialog sequences for both of these installers are so similar to what is shown in
Figure 12-3 that I’m not going to include them here, as I don’t want to spend much more than a page
or two on this topic. However, I do need to make sure that you have Audacity 2.0.5 upgraded using
all of these utilities that will maximize your Android application development workstation with these
supported codecs and audio engineering features (algorithms) which are compatible with the digital
audio features that are currently offered by the Android 4.x OS and Android 5.x OS.
The PCM (uncompressed) Wave (WAV) audio assets I’m going to use in your HelloUniverse
application were given to me to use for educational purposes in this book by the internationally
renowned sound designer Frank Serafine, a personal life-long friend and film and television
production colleague of mine. In fact, we are working together on a film and a television series project
this year, but it’s nothing space-related! Just in case you want to get your own digital audio assets for
your Android applications, I will include a short section on free digital audio sample searches next!
Free Digital Audio: Locate HelloUniverse Audio
To find some free for commercial use audio samples, I’m going to use the Google Search Engine,
and type in a query, for something on the order of Free Audio Samples, Free Digital Audio Samples,
Free Audio Files, or Free Digital Audio Files, and similar Google search term combinations. It’s
important to note that each of these Google searches will turn up completely different results due to
keywords used in each of the different web sites that offer these digital audio assets. Be advised that
many of the paid audio sample web sites will put the word “free” in their web sites (as an SEO tactic)
so that they will come up on these types of free audio sample searches. To find word combinations,
use the plus symbol, such as: Free+Digital+Audio+Files for instance. This will tell the search engine
that you want to find sites where these words are located right next to each other.
There are dozens of good free audio sample web sites, all of which will fit the bill for your needs, so
be sure and investigate these further when you have some spare time. Make sure that the ones that
you use for your Android application development are free for commercial use, do not require any
royalty payments, and do not have any copyright (usage) restrictions. What you want to look for is
high-quality, uncompressed PCM (.wav file format) samples, using 16-bit or better (24-bit or 32-bit)
sample resolution, with a 32 kHz, 44.1 kHz, or 48 kHz sample frequency (sample rates).
Note that if you download and use MP3 files (which most of these sites also offer), they will already
have been compressed, and will be ready for use, but you will not have any control over the
compression and optimization process. This is because much of the original audio sample data will
have already been thrown away during the compression process, and you do not want to compress
any kind of data which is already (lossy) compressed!
Figure 12-4. FFmpeg/LAME download page download links section, and the two download links to click