Question

I am making a simple application for iPhone, and I want to enter a short audio file on an object click. Which of .caf and .wav would be better?

I am building a simple application in Cocos2d in which balloons produce a pop sound when clicked. What are the memory issues with both sound versions?

Answer 1

If you do not need specific Core Audio Format features, then WAV has more universal support (and it would be my default choice for that reason).

Core Audio Format basically functions as a container for other audio file formats, including WAV. Core Audio Format has many great features, but it’s not evident from the description that you need any of these.

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In response to a deleted comment, which was moved to the question:

I can’t speak for Cocos2d specifically, so I will write about the file formats in general: WAV does not use data compression. CAF may. If it is a short sound file, you probably don’t want data compression (because it requires a good amount of processing to convert to LPCM for playback). If you play the pop often, then you will want to hold onto an uncompressed version of the audio data for easy processing. 1 second will require 44100 * 2 bytes at CD quality in memory (per channel).

For a short sound file such as a balloon pop, a 16 bit WAV file sounds ideal. In that sense, the memory difference should not be a deciding factor. If you have a lot of audio files, or long audio files to load into memory, then the situation changes. For now, I don’t consider memory to be a problem in your case. Since CAF is a container, its uncompressed representation will be nearly identical (the difference will be a little more header data in the CAF).