Distortions when fading out mp3 files on ios - ios

I have an mp3 file that is almost sine-wave like, due to which whenever i fade it out, there are distortions. I need fadeouts over really short periods of time (0.05 seconds). The timer resolution is not enough to cover this. As a result i need to read out the samples, adjust their gain, and play them back. I did this in the original flash/AS3 version of the app but can someone tell me how to do this via core-audio on ios ?

In case anyone wanted something similar, i managed to do this. Basically, i used AudioQueues and Extended Audio File Services.
I read in the mp3 files using ExtAudioFileServices while specifying a 32 bit PCM format. I then start an AudioQueue and in the call back i read in from the buffers corresponding to files, adjust their gain, and copy them to the queue buffer. Voila :D

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Transcoding fMP4 to HLS while writing on iOS using FFmpeg

TL;DR
I want to convert fMP4 fragments to TS segments (for HLS) as the fragments are being written using FFmpeg on an iOS device.
Why?
I'm trying to achieve live uploading on iOS while maintaining a seamless, HD copy locally.
What I've tried
Rolling AVAssetWriters where each writes for 8 seconds, then concatenating the MP4s together via FFmpeg.
What went wrong - There are blips in the audio and video at times. I've identified 3 reasons for this.
1) Priming frames for audio written by the AAC encoder creating gaps.
2) Since video frames are 33.33ms long, and audio frames 0.022ms long, it's possible for them to not line up at the end of a file.
3) The lack of frame accurate encoding present on Mac OS, but not available for iOS Details Here
FFmpeg muxing a large video only MP4 file with raw audio into TS segments. The work was based on the Kickflip SDK
What Went Wrong - Every once in a while an audio only file would get uploaded, with no video whatsoever. Never able to reproduce it in-house, but it was pretty upsetting to our users when they didn't record what they thought they did. There were also issues with accurate seeking on the final segments, almost like the TS segments were incorrectly time stamped.
What I'm thinking now
Apple was pushing fMP4 at WWDC this year (2016) and I hadn't looked into it much at all before that. Since an fMP4 file can be read, and played while it's being written, I thought that it would be possible for FFmpeg to transcode the file as it's being written as well, as long as we hold off sending the bytes to FFmpeg until each fragment within the file is finished.
However, I'm not familiar enough with the FFmpeg C API, I only used it briefly within attempt #2.
What I need from you
Is this a feasible solution? Is anybody familiar enough with fMP4 to know if I can actually accomplish this?
How will I know that AVFoundation has finished writing a fragment within the file so that I can pipe it into FFmpeg?
How can I take data from a file on disk, chunk at a time, pass it into FFmpeg and have it spit out TS segments?
Strictly speaking you don't need to transcode the fmp4 if it contains h264+aac, you just need to repackage the sample data as TS. (using ffmpeg -codec copy or gpac)
Wrt. alignment (1.2) I suppose this all depends on your encoder settings (frame rate, sample rate and GOP size). It is certainly possible to make sure that audio and video align exactly at fragment boundaries (see for example: this table). If you're targeting iOS, I would recommend using HLS protocol version 3 (or 4) allowing timing to be represented more accurately. This also allows you to stream audio and video separately (non-multiplexed).
I believe ffmpeg should be capable of pushing a live fmp4 stream (ie. using a long-running HTTP POST), but playout requires origin software to do something meaningful with it (ie. stream to HLS).

DirectX.Capture FrameRates

I'm using DirectX.Capture library to save to an AVI fomr Webcam. I need video to be saved to have 50fps or more, but when i use this:
capture.FrameRate = 59.994;
FrameRate doesn't change at all. It had 30 before that line and passing that line it keeps its 30. I tried other values, even 20 and 10, and nothing changes.
What else should i do so i can be able to change that value? or it is something regarding my hardware and i can hope it works in other machine?
Please help me, i don't know what to do.
Thanx
The source material (video, app/etc), is probably only being updated at 30fps, either because that is the way the video codec or app behaves, or because you have vsync turned on in the target app (check vsync settings, it might be getting forced by the video card drivers if there is hardware acceleration). The behaviour of DirectX.Capture is probably to clamp to the highest available framerate from the source.
If you really want to make the video 50fps, capture it at its native rate (30/29.97) and just resample the video using some other software (note that this would be a destructive operation since 50 is not a clean multiple of 30). This will be no different from what DX capture would do if you could force it at 50fps (even if its nonsensical due to the source material being at a lower framerate). FYI most video files are between 25 and 30 FPS.

is it possible for avassetwriter to output to memory

I would like to write an iphone app that continuously capture video, h.264 encode them in 10 seconds interval and upload to a storage server. This can be done with avassetwriter, and I can keep on deleting the old files as I create new ones. However, as flash memory have a limited write cycles, this scheme will destroy the flash after a few thousand write cycles through the flash. Is there a way to redirect avassetwriter to memory, or create a ram drive on the iphone?
Thanks!
Yes avassetwriter is the only way to get to the hardware decoder. and simply reading back the file while its written doesn't give you the moov atoms so avfoundation or mpmediaplayer based players won't be able to read it back. you only have a couple choices , periodically stop the asassetwriter and write to the file on a background thread, effectively segmenting your movie into smaller complete files. or you could deal with the incomplete mp4 on the server side, you will have to decode the raw nalu's and recreate the missing moov atoms. If your using ffmpeg mov.c is source to look at. This is also were an incomplete mp4 file would fail.

Using Audio Units to play several short audio files with overlap

I have run through an audio units tutorial for a sine wave generator and done a bit of reading, and I understand basically how it is working. What I would actually like to do for my app, is play a short sound file in response to some external event. These sounds would be about 1-2 seconds in duration and occur at a rate of about about 1-2 per second.
Basically where I am at right now is trying to figure out how to play an actual audio file using my audio unit, rather than generating a sine wave. So basically my question is, how do I get an audio unit to play an audio file?
Do I simply read bytes from the audio file into the buffer in the render callback?
(if so what class do I need to deal with to open / convert / decompress / read the audio file)
or is there some simpler method where I could maybe just hand off the entire buffer and tell it to play?
Any names of specific classes or APIs I will need to look at to accomplish this would be very helpful.
OK, check this:
http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/samplecode/MixerHost/Introduction/Intro.html
EDIT: That is a sample project. This page has detailed instructions with inline code to setup common configurations: http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ipad/#DOCUMENTATION/MusicAudio/Conceptual/AudioUnitHostingGuide_iOS/ConstructingAudioUnitApps/ConstructingAudioUnitApps.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40009492-CH16-SW1
If you don't mind being tied to IOS 5+, you should look into AUFilePlayer. It is much easer then using the callbacks and you don't have to worry about setting up your own ring buffer (something that you would need to do if you want to avoid loading all of your audio data into memory on start-up)

Skip between multiple files while playing audio in iPhone iOS

For a project I need to handle audio in an iPhone app quite special and hope somebody may point me in the right direction.
Lets say you have a fixed set of up to thirty audio files of the same length (2-3 sec, non-compressed). While a que is playing from one audio file it should be able to update parameters that makes the playing continue from another audio file from the same timestamp the previous audiofile ended playing. If the different audio files is different versions of heavely filtered audio it should be possible to "slide" between them an get the impression that you applied the filter directly. The filtering is at the moment not possible to achive in realtime on an iPhone, therefore the prerendered files.
If A B and C is different audio files I like to be able to:
Play A without interruption:
Start AAAAAAAAAAAAA Stop
Or start play A and continue over in B and then C, initiated while playing
Start AAABBBBBBBBCC Stop
Ideally is should be possible to play two er more ques at the same time. Latency is not that important, but the skipping between files should ideally not produce clicks or delays.
I have looked into using Audio Queue Services (which look like hell to dive into) and sniffed on OpenAl. Could anyone give me a ruff overview and a general direction I can spend the next days burried into?
Try using the iOS Audio Unit API, particularly a mixer unit connected to RemoteIO for audio output.
I managed to do this by using FMOD Designer. FMOD (http://www.fmod.org/) is a sound design framework for game development, that supports iOS development. I made a multitrack-event in FMOD Designer with different layers for each sound clip. Add a parameter in the horizontal bar that lets you controll which sound clip to play in realtime. The trick is to let each soundclip continue over the whole bar and controll which sound that is beeing heard by using a volume effect (0-100%) like in the attached picture. In that way you are ensured that skipping between files follow the same timecode. I have tried this successfully with up to thirty layers, but experienced some double playing. This seemed to dissapear if I cut the number down to fifteen.
It should be possible to use iOS Audio Unit API if you are comfortable with this, but for those of us that like the most simple sollution FMOD is quite good :) Thanks to Ellen S for the sollution tip!
Screenshot of the multitrack-event in FMOD Designer:
https://plus.google.com/photos/106278910734599034045/albums/5723469198734595793?authkey=CNSIkbyYw8PM2wE

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