Ben Long is a composer, sound designer and audio director at Noise Buffet. His ebook, "The Insiders Guide To Music & Sound for Mobile Games" is a basic introduction to the creative, technical and business aspects in the fast paced, mobile game development industry. Ben is a frequent guest speaker at global conferences such as GDC and SXSW covering the subject of creativity in interactive audio. He is featured in numerous game design textbooks and supports the #gameaudio community on the twitter. Find him on Google+ and throughout the webiverse.
READER Q&A
Hi Ben,
Just bought your E-Book.
First of all - Thank you for writing it !
Now I have a question that bothers me - I'm a composer and I also do alot of music for iPhone and Android...
And I hate the fact that it all goes at the end to MONO !...
but - to whoever uses the headphones - they can hear STEREO,
so I want to ask you - Do you always export the music on MONO and give up the stereo image option to whoever will use the headphones or not ? Do you think in the future mobile phones will have 2 speakers ? :)
Thanks,
Alon Kaplan
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Hi Alon,
The iPhone speaker is actually mono and the same goes for the iPad2. Apple has implemented what they call "enhanced mono" for the built in speakers in both devices. It sounds pretty good, but it's still mono. I try my best to keep everything stereo in hopes of possible headphone usage, however, some games are cramped for space and require mono just to keep the entire app under 20MB. I would prefer that to rendering at 96Kbps, which is the lowest most of us will dare to go! The Android tablets now have true stereo output on their built in speakers, which allows for more freedom with audio content. Let's hope Apple does the same for the iPhone 5, 6 and beyond..
Cheers,
Ben