Audio Features of the Mobile Video & Audio SDK

The audio encoding capabilities of the MercuryXMS Mobile Video & Audio SDK provide you with a powerful set of tools to convert audio to formats suitable for delivery to and listening on an MMS mobile handset.

While many handsets today support MP3, AAC and other formats, delivering music over the air is still a difficult proposition for many developers. To deliver audio through MMS messages still requires leveraging compression technologies in order to deliver the smallest payload possible with the best quality. The most common formats today are AMR-NB (Adaptive Multi Rate - Narrow Band) and WAV formats.

Click here to listen to a sample MP3 file (780kb)

Click here to listen to the sample in AMR format (78kb)
(Requires an AMR player such as Quicktime)

The MercuryXMS Mobile Video & Audio SDK gives you the capability to encode any DirectX® compatible sound file to either AMR format or WAV format - the two most commonly supported audio formats on MMS handsets today.

You can convert MP3, ASF, ASX, WMA, WMP, WMV, SND, AU, SND, AIFF files to AMR or WAV - with just a few lines of code you can deliver sound bites, music files, song clips, previews, news headlines - any audio file - to your users mobile phones.

With MP3 files, you can extract MP3 song data from the MP3 track to enhance your MMS message even further using ID3v2 tag extraction. This allows you to send previews of audio files directly to mobile handsets with information about the actual track embedded in the message. With Windows Media Audio files, you can extract audio content information (similar to MP3 tag extraction) such as artist, title, etc.

With AMR conversion, you can specify any of the standard bit rates including AMR, AMR-WB, and AMR-NB. With WAV conversion, you can use any
DirectX® codec to convert to a wide range of WAV formats with customizable bit rates and audio quality.

The start time and duration can be specified, with a 'fade' feature - these functions allow you to extract any portion of an audio clip for delivery directly to a mobile phone with fade in/out features for a better user experience when extracting specific sections of the original audio file for delivery.

Together with the MMS SDK, you can encode audio for mobile phones on the fly or in batch mode - in either case, we provide you with an SDK that gives you the flexibility to do both.

The MercuryXMS MMS SDK also supports forward locking of audio with support for Nokia and OMA forward lock, and SonyEricsson content protection. This allows you to protect the audio you send with DRM capabilities so that the target user cannot forward the content to another handset.