How Much Music?
We have SFX boards in both 2MB and 16MB versions. You may be thinking "Wow, that is nothing, I send emails bigger
than that on a daily basis!" But you'd be surprised! For sound effects and small embedded audio devices, you need a
surprisingly small amount of space.
Depending on whether or not you compress the audio, have stereo or mono, CD quality or 'every day' quality, you can
store anywhere up to approx an hour of compressed music (mono 22KHz Ogg Vorbis on the 16MB version)
Compressed or No?
First up, remember you can always have compressed audio which saves you a ton of space. The Sound Board can
handle Ogg Vorbis (a sort of royalty-free MP3 format) in any bit rate
Stereo or Mono
Most projects do not need true stereo, if you are only using one speaker or if you don't need two distinct channels,
record/convert your audio as Mono! You'll get the same audio from both left and right channels and fit 2x as much
music.
Bit Rates / Sample Rates
CD quality audio is 44.1KHz 16Bit, thats 44100 2-byte samples per second. While you can decode audio on the Sound
Boards at that rate, often times your speakers or headphones aren't that good anyways.
We suggest sticking with 16 bits, but reducing the sample rate to 22KHz unless you are piping the audio into a quality
stereo system or expect users to have fancy headphones plugged in. If you're doing 'voice' type effects, you may be
able to go down to 11KHz. Every time you reduce the sample rate, you can double or triple the length of audio.
Some examples
Uncompressed WAV
The absolute biggest files you can generate and play are CD quality uncompressed stereo WAV files, at 44.KHz/16 bit.
Stereo WAV 44.1 KHz 16 Bit - (2 bytes * 2 channels * 44100) = ~175 KB per second, so 2MB can hold 12 seconds, 16MB
can hold 90 seconds
Mono WAV 44.1 KHz 16 Bit - (2 bytes * 1 channels * 44100) = ~88 KB per second, so 2MB can hold 23 seconds, 16MB
can hold 180 seconds (3 minutes)
Stereo WAV 22 KHz 16 Bit - (2 bytes * 2 channels * 22050) = ~88 KB per second, so 2MB can hold 23 seconds, 16MB
can hold 180 seconds (3 minutes)
Mono WAV 22 KHz 16 Bit - (2 bytes * 1 channels * 22050) = ~44 KB per second, so 2MB can hold 45 seconds, 16MB
can hold 6 minutes
Stereo WAV 11 KHz 16 Bit - (2 bytes * 2 channels * 11025) = ~44 KB per second, so 2MB can hold 45 seconds, 16MB can
hold 6 minutes
Mono WAV 11 KHz 16 Bit - (2 bytes * 1 channels * 11025) = ~22 KB per second, so 2MB can hold 90 seconds, 16MB can
hold 12 minutes
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