Form spec proposal: configure audio quality for internal recording

[seadowg]

@Tino_Kreutzer

In your testing, did you find a noticeable difference in speaker/voice quality between voice-only and low, and between low and normal?

Here's a zip of one of the test recordings I made at AMR, 24kbps AACand WAV as an example:

street_recording.zip (2.1 MB)

Basically we found with heavier background noise that 24 had an advantage over AMR. It also feels like 24 would be usable in situations where you're interested in picking out what's happening in the background for context (whereas AMR makes that hard). As a side note we were pretty impressed with AMR overall and found even with a couple of people speaking over each other it worked fine.

@Tino_Kreutzer

I would just like to confirm if there are strong reasons against adding another level for when "normal" may not be high enough quality (to capture use cases that are not simple voice-related, e.g. recording a sample of music, birdsong, etc.). This could be using 44kHz and 192kbps.

Oh, sorry I didn't mean to suggest we were dismissing that! I started testing out "low" first and haven't played around with a "high" setting yet. For use cases like that (recording music samples, birdsongs) do you have contacts we could talk to? I think with "low" as we're still really focused on voices but I'm less clear on what use cases/level of detail might drive out a "high" quality.

We did do a quick test comparing recordings at higher AAC bitrates and found we didn't see much of a difference between 64 and 320 but did see a difference between 320 AAC and lossless (WAV). I'd want to get some examples of sounds people are trying to capture, so we're testing the right things though.