Form spec proposal: configure audio quality for internal recording

[seadowg]

@LN

outdoor fountain in a courtyard

I'll need to redo the fountain experiment as I lost the .wav. I'm still unsure whether it's a good test of what people would need from a higher quality.

@LN

It sounds like there is broad agreement that adding a lossless option would be beneficial. That seems it would pretty clearly be FLAC as m4a, 44.1 kHz, 16-bit. I think it would probably be worth doing stereo for those who might have external mics. Maybe that's one to add for this initial release?

Personally I use Collect for field recording for sounds that will eventually go into music, so I'm definitely all for a lossless format being added at some point! I'm not sure about stereo. Are you suggesting we add more configuration values or another parameter to support that?

@LN

Two bad outcomes would be that we pick a bitrate that does not capture any meaningfully greater amount of information but results in file sizes that are impractically large (e.g. 128kbps vs 192kbps) or that we pick a bitrate that doesn't capture enough (e.g. 192kbps vs 256kbps).

Totally agree. I'd still love to be able to talk to people with/hear stories about non-speech use cases to get a sense of what quality they'd need.

[LN]

@aurdipas

It was the default amr coming with the app.

That is very likely to be narrowband.

@LN

adding a lossless option would be beneficial. That seems it would pretty clearly be...

I realize now I got a little ahead of myself. First, it turns out that the Android recording APIs we use don't surface a lossless option so the implementation will not be easy. Second, it's not clear whether the lossless option should just be called high. And finally, things like stereo vs. mono and file format are probably not quite as obvious as it felt to me last night.