Question Converting raw WAV byte[] to mp3 byte[]?

Hi everyone!

A project I'm working on requires frequent sending of audio from device to a server. I'm currently sending a WAV byte[] but need to compress audio for efficiency. I've been reading into the math behind the WAV to mp3 compression but I imagine there is a better way than implementing this myself.

Everything I've seen requires saving the audio on device as a .wav before converting it to mp3. I wanted to avoid this and have been working directly with the byte array stored in memory so far.

Is there any tool that might allow me to directly convert this wav byte[] to an mp3 byte[]?

Thanks in advance for any tips or advice!

 

Until a few years ago, the algorithms to convert WAV to MP3 were patented, so many systems including Unity did not include any code to make that conversion. Playing back those files was not as much of a problem.

You will need a library that implements that conversion. Even with today's computers, MP3 is not an ideal real-time compression format. There are other formats out there, which can be run on lightweight computers like phones in real-time. None that I know of will be written in C#, you'll need to be able to write code that calls a native library.

 

Thanks for the response halley! I ended up cobbling together an MP3 converter using some pieces from here: https://github.com/Team-on/Unity3D-save-audioClip-to-MP3.

I'll definitely take your advice and move to some more efficient format in the near future though.

 

Be aware that asset is under a license that is completely incompatible with Unity. Basically the GPL is written in a way that tries to force the license onto any other software resources compiled against it. Since you don't own the engine you can't relicense it, and you don't own the asset so you can't relicense it to bypass the GPL.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.en.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs