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Hello.

I've been wondering for a while now about the recording capabilities of my iPhone. With the addition of the Apogee Mic and others it could be a good little recorder maybe?

But I wonder, does any one know the maximum sample rate / bit depth of the iPhone?

I personally have the iPhone 4 with iOS 5.

Thanks! James

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I'm 99.9% sure it's 48kHz, 16-bit Mono (or Stereo if you have a plug-in mic of some sort which supports Stereo). I use the FiRe app which is one of the most comprehensive and professional-geared recording apps, and that's the max it supports. On older iPhones like the 3G I believe it was only 44.1kHz.

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  • Thank you for your answer. And just so everyone who searches for this question, after you said about the FiRe app, I contacted the Audiofile Engineering guys and asked about this, their response was: "FiRe 2 records @ 48 kHz/16-bit. In a future update, we'll allow users to change the sample rate of their recordings so they're not limited to just 48 kHz." ...I do hope that Apple will allow future iPhones/iPod Touches to support 24bit as along with a decent iDevice compatible microphone (the Apogee Mic?) it could be a very handy and portable quick and dirty sound recording device.
    – littlejim84
    Commented Aug 31, 2012 at 8:11
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Frankly, recording with 24bit depth is a waste of space if a mobile phone is within half a meter of the recording equipment, let alone if it is the recording equipment.

Your phones uses high powered bursts of pulsed RF to talk to the next cell tower (which will tend to be at some distance) regularly. Do yourself a favor and get some more dedicated recording equipment.

As a rule of thumb: built-in electret condensor mic capsules of the kind that fit within phones or handheld recorders have enough of a relevant noise floor that recording with more than 16bit resolution is nonsensical. You can fill in the 8 additional bits of resolution with a good random number generator afterwards for equivalent results.

The preamps and mics necessary to warrant going to more than 16bit have power and space requirements incompatible with a mobile phone.

Given how popular requests for 96/24 on clearly unsuitable recording equipment are, I have little doubt that we'll be seeing a marketing push to 192/32 bit recording soonish and 384/48 bit next. Flash memory producers will love it.

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you can actually put 48 KHz / 24 bits on the iPhone. when you import from a CD onto iTunes, the maximum is 48 KHz /16 bits

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  • CD format is 44.1kHz,16-bit. Not 48kHz.
    – Mark
    Commented Jan 12, 2019 at 1:20

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