Which is the best audio format for iOS/WP8/Android?

Which audio formats should I use if I want to create songs and sound effects for iOS/WP8/Android game? I want that the songs and sound effects work on the three different platforms.

MP3 and WAV.

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Does it matter which bit rate the wav and mp3 files have? Because there exists huge differences:
mp3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#VBR
wav: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAV

Which bit rate should I use?

You use whatever sounds best for you and your game. Selecting a bit rate is not something that another person can tell you. You use a bit rate that works for you and provides a good balance between file size and output quality.​

Note that MP3 is a license-encumbered format, which includes distribution of MP3-encoded files in games (applicable to games where more than 5000 copies are distributed). MP4 does not incur any licensing fees for distributing files and is a widely supported format.

I agree with what KonajuGames said. I generally recommend going with wav files as few people will be playing your game with headphones.

@KonajuGames What music format would you recommend that is supported on WP7, WP8, Windows 8, iOS and Android? Is MP4 such a format?

I don’t want to pay license fees. What format should I use if I don’t want to pay license fees?

MP4 is a container format. It often contains AAC encoded audio streams, so it is often refered to as MP4/AAC and uses the .m4a file extension, though it can also be found with .mp4 or .aac extensions.

MP4/AAC will work natively on all platforms that MonoGame supports except for PS Vita (only supports MP3). I’m not sure about Linux, but our plan for Linux is to support Vorbis for music.

The MonoGame content pipeline will be updated soon to output songs in the desired format for each platform. Note that our content pipeline will not support MP3 as an output format as we do not want to encourage or assist developers in violating the MP3 licensing rules. We will still support it as a playback format and pre-created MP3 files will be supported in the content pipeline as a pass-through option. This will operate under the assumption that the developer is aware of the licensing requirements.

I have documented our plan here

I’ve been successfully using uncompiled ogg and m4a files on Android and IOS
but it’s not a suggested course of action by the official monogame guidelines.

Can you please tell me how to use .aac or .m4a in an iOS MonoGame project? I had zero success loading any of these formats with build action set to Content. I place them in the Content folder but I keep getting the following exception:

System.Exception: Could not initialize an instance of the type ‘MonoTouch.AVFoundation.AVAudioPlayer’: the native ‘initWithContentsOfURL:error:’ method returned nil.

It is possible to ignore this condition by setting

And the MonoGame content project cant import them for processing so am not sure what to do here. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.