Sound is a funny thing, and I am not even going to attempt to begin to explain its intricacies here. If you are interested in such things as sample rates and artifacting and normalisation then I suggest you read about them here. What I will say is this.

When we recorded all the sound files for the Lingopal apps, we used professional recording studios – the kind with the artist locked in a sound-proof booth – and recorded the files in the largest format possible, which are wave files. There may well be larger file formats around but this is an industry standard. The wave (or .wav) files would make any of our applications prohibitively enormous, so they had to be compressed.The trick is to compress them as much as possible, without  killing the quality of the sound. Unfortunately with every compression you’re going to do that to some extent.

Originally we compressed all the apps down pretty low to 16kbps. These have now been decompressed to 32kbps. That doesn’t mean the sound files are twice as good, or loud, but there is definitely an improvement. This is most noticeable when listening to the files with head-phones on, but it’s obvious with the iPhone speakers too. Unfortunately we’re limited by the capabilities of those speakers, but we think that, if and when Apple brings out a new iPhone with better speakers, then we’ll be well placed to take advantage of it.

In doing the builds we made a couple of errors. The Spanish and German languages had a lot of their sound files removed. They might look like this:

German & Spanish have plenty of sound missing - the fix is on its way!

Fortunately this was brought to our attention pretty quickly, and I’m happy to say that the corrected versions are on their way to the iTunes store now. Apologies to those who have been inconvenienced by it.