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Step 9Sounding Good...?
So, one of the big strengths of the iPhone/iPod is that you know that it's got the capacity to play excellent-sounding audio, and that players are likely to have headphones they can use because they're probably using the iPod functionality on a relatively regular basis.
But I play a lot of games at home, and pipe the audio through the external speakers, 'cause wearing headphones around the house isn't something I'm used to. So even though the iPhone/iPod is capable of playing beautiful music through the proper outputs, a good portion of the time it sounds like a bunch of people banging tin cans together.
Worse, it wasn't simply that everything just sounded worse across the board - it was that they sounded totally *different*. Low-end audio was completely absent, and the higher frequencies became harsher and less tolerable.
Through the Headphones:
Through the speakers:
What we'd tried to do was actually have each portion of the audio spectrum mean something. The low frequencies - the bassline - would tell you when you had a fare, and what type of fare you had (short distance, med. distance, or long distance). The midrange was the "base beat," which was effectively an audio clock, that reminded you that time was progressing. The high range, or the "drum and bass" beat was a reinforcement of how fast you were going. The more "jangly" high-pitched cymbal and pitched-up drums you had going, the faster you were going. (well, causally-speaking, the reverse of that, but whatever...)
Ideally, you'd hear everything, whether you were listening to it through headphones or the external speakers - even if one source sounded worse. The problem was that through the headphones, you could hear everything and it sounded great. But if you listened to it through the speakers, you couldn't hear the bass, and the high-pitched drum sounds were really tinny and irritatingly harsh.
We rebalanced the audio, mitigating a lot of the high-pitched stuff, and turning the bass up - you literally couldn't hear it at all through the speakers before. The problem was that now that you had something acceptable through the speakers, it sounded overly bassy and totally "flat" without the higher-pitched sounds through the headphones.
While in an ideal world, the solution would have been to actually trigger entirely different audio whether you have a headset plugged in or not, the best solution that was available to us was really quite simple - brute force and iteration.
We'd simply go through every single sample, listen to it under both circumstances, alone and in combination with the other samples, and using an audio editor, manually mute things that were overly harsh on the external speakers, and cranked the bassline and lower frequencies as loud as we could without making things sound bad on the headphones.
There used to be certain fares who would whistle while they were going for a ride - but all the whistling sounds were so harsh through the speakers that they all ended up being removed. It also turned out that having repetitive loops that were that high frequency also got really, really irritating in a way that the lower frequency loops didn't... In the end, anything other than percussion that was in the higher frequencies was cut out, and only the "cymbal" sounds were left in that range.
Whistle Loop:
If you loop that, or play it 10 times, it'll get recognizable and really annoying. Compare that to this:
...which makes you want to claw your ears out a lot less. Couple that with the tinny output of the built-in speakers, and you had a strong indicator that if you wanted a melodic track, it had better stay out of the high frequencies.
In the end, with headphones, the game sounds a little muffled, and without headphones, the basslines are still only barely audible. But it was an acceptable compromise, and the game still sounds great. More importantly, we were able to keep all the layers of "information" that were contained in the audio track without sacrificing much in the way of sound quality.
But I play a lot of games at home, and pipe the audio through the external speakers, 'cause wearing headphones around the house isn't something I'm used to. So even though the iPhone/iPod is capable of playing beautiful music through the proper outputs, a good portion of the time it sounds like a bunch of people banging tin cans together.
Worse, it wasn't simply that everything just sounded worse across the board - it was that they sounded totally *different*. Low-end audio was completely absent, and the higher frequencies became harsher and less tolerable.
Through the Headphones:
Through the speakers:
What we'd tried to do was actually have each portion of the audio spectrum mean something. The low frequencies - the bassline - would tell you when you had a fare, and what type of fare you had (short distance, med. distance, or long distance). The midrange was the "base beat," which was effectively an audio clock, that reminded you that time was progressing. The high range, or the "drum and bass" beat was a reinforcement of how fast you were going. The more "jangly" high-pitched cymbal and pitched-up drums you had going, the faster you were going. (well, causally-speaking, the reverse of that, but whatever...)
Ideally, you'd hear everything, whether you were listening to it through headphones or the external speakers - even if one source sounded worse. The problem was that through the headphones, you could hear everything and it sounded great. But if you listened to it through the speakers, you couldn't hear the bass, and the high-pitched drum sounds were really tinny and irritatingly harsh.
We rebalanced the audio, mitigating a lot of the high-pitched stuff, and turning the bass up - you literally couldn't hear it at all through the speakers before. The problem was that now that you had something acceptable through the speakers, it sounded overly bassy and totally "flat" without the higher-pitched sounds through the headphones.
While in an ideal world, the solution would have been to actually trigger entirely different audio whether you have a headset plugged in or not, the best solution that was available to us was really quite simple - brute force and iteration.
We'd simply go through every single sample, listen to it under both circumstances, alone and in combination with the other samples, and using an audio editor, manually mute things that were overly harsh on the external speakers, and cranked the bassline and lower frequencies as loud as we could without making things sound bad on the headphones.
There used to be certain fares who would whistle while they were going for a ride - but all the whistling sounds were so harsh through the speakers that they all ended up being removed. It also turned out that having repetitive loops that were that high frequency also got really, really irritating in a way that the lower frequency loops didn't... In the end, anything other than percussion that was in the higher frequencies was cut out, and only the "cymbal" sounds were left in that range.
Whistle Loop:
If you loop that, or play it 10 times, it'll get recognizable and really annoying. Compare that to this:
...which makes you want to claw your ears out a lot less. Couple that with the tinny output of the built-in speakers, and you had a strong indicator that if you wanted a melodic track, it had better stay out of the high frequencies.
In the end, with headphones, the game sounds a little muffled, and without headphones, the basslines are still only barely audible. But it was an acceptable compromise, and the game still sounds great. More importantly, we were able to keep all the layers of "information" that were contained in the audio track without sacrificing much in the way of sound quality.
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