Latest Release Starting to Show up in the App Store

We are starting to receive emails from Apple that the v1.3 applications are being approved.  These tend to trickle in and so far the only one approved is AccelaStudy Chinese | English but we expect others to be approved soon.

Happy New Year! – AccelaStudy™ v1.3 Released for Review

Happy New Year to all of our customers! We finally completed v1.3 of AccelaStudy and submitted the first audio-enabled versions of AccelaStudy a few days ago. All languages except Polish have been recorded and prepared for the device. Polish will be recorded in early January and available before the end of the month.

There are a few reasons why we were so long in getting v1.3 completed. The main reason has to do with a trade off between the quality of the audio files and the size of the application that is installed on the device.

Most of our voice talents record the individual words at a very high sample rate. The higher the sample rate, the more precise the recording. Of course, at the highest sample rate, the recording is more detailed than any human can differentiate. But at the lowest sample rate, important inflections, accents, and other nuances can be lost.

The drawback to a high sample rate is the size of the audio file. Each AccelaStudy product has 2 languages – German and English, for example. The current vocabulary list is approximately 2,100 words. Each of these words is recorded in German and English, resulting in approximately 4,200 audio files. The unedited audio files for all of these words takes up approximately 1.4 GB of disk space. That is a massive iPhone application, especially considering there are still some early iPhones out there with only 4 GB of total storage. Also, considering that the eventual vocabulary size of each AccelaStudy product will be over 6,000 words (12,000 audio files), the size of the audio files really needs to be reduced.

The best way to reduce audio file size is to compress the audio. The best compressed format is MP3. Unfortunately, there are a number of drawbacks to using MP3 in an audio-enabled application on the iPhone. MP3 audio is expanded on-the-fly by hardware on the iPhone. Due to this dependency on hardware resources, the device can only play one MP3 audio file at once – the hardware cannot be shared between applications. So if a user is playing some nice background music on the iPhone and then AccelaStudy runs and tries to play an audio file, the background music is stopped and then the audio file plays. The background music does not resume – it is as if the Stop button was pressed. We know a lot of our customers listen to music while studying vocabulary. Clearly, MP3 was not the right choice.

In the end, we stayed with uncompressed PCM audio (.wav files) with a reduced sample rate. The sample rate is still very high relative to the audio files used by others and still results in a hefty application size at around 200 MB for each AccelaStudy application. However, we believe that our customers will find our audio recordings very clear and static-free and a pleasure to listen to, even over long study sessions.

The audio in AccelaStudy stands out in a few other ways as well:

• For all languages where it is appropriate (Spanish, German, etc.) the definite article is also recorded. So the German word “Nachmittag” is displayed and recorded as “der Nachmittag”.
• For languages with words that differ by gender, all gender variations are recorded as separate audio files but chained together.  So “der Verwalter” and “die Verwalterin” are recorded individually but played back with masculine first, followed by the feminine.  Neuter variations are also provided where appropriate.
• Recordings of both languages are provided for all words.  So for German | English, the English word is recorded as well as all variations of the German word.  For German words with masculine, feminine, and neuter forms, this results in FOUR actual recordings for a single “word”.  As far as we know, AccelaStudy is the only application out there that does this.

We have more audio features planned for future releases.  We will post here when we are ready to announce them.

As always, please feel free to share your thoughts and concerns at support@accelastudy.com!