[Feature] Recorder audio quality

Platform

iOS
Android

Obsidian Mobile version: v1.0.3


Audio output on the mobile recorder could be improved.

It sounds like there are some volume fluctuations, a sort of muffled quality, & weird compression going on.

As an example, I recorded the same thing twice, one with the iOS Voice Memos app, and one with Obsidian to compare:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1YVg79uqUSflSLvfFD74wuyzphXML3xr-?usp=sharing

On my iPhone speaker, it’s not that different when I play the two back; on desktop, the difference is apparent.

Summarizing from discord conversation.

Compared to iOS Voice Memos (right), the Obsidian output (left) has a much narrower audio spectrum:

That may be because the mobile Safari MediaRecorder API only supports the audio/mp4 mimeType. So using the fancy AudioContext / compression API could only do very limited improvements on the low-fidelity output from the MediaRecorder.

Pretty much the only fix is a native plugin or working with the raw PCM using JS libraries which is a big development effort and I get the vibe it’s not worth the cost.

But, thank you to Obsidian team for looking into it