i'm a sound designer and composer for mobile games, especially casual games for android/ios. i still have to learn a lot about mixing and mastering, but when it comes to mastering for an android game, i can't find any good sources for that.
a lot of sound designers or developers say something like: make it mono, normalize if it's not loud enough, compress, do some loudness measuring, etc..
by now, i normally use stereo for music and mono for sound effects (mono is louder on the device speakers i think) and master like i would master for videos or music. that's fine for ios i think.
when i play these same sounds on android, some are not loud enough and some sound distorted.
i tried to analyze system sounds from my nexus and a samsung galaxy into my wave editor and it seems that they didn't care about any real mastering techniques. for example, some click sounds peak at something like +5db to be loud enough. it seems like google and the manufacturers don't know how this bad sound card or the speakers work, so they can't give any guideline for sounds.
for the game i am currently working on, i've done some other things: stereo files with 55% stereo width; smoothly take out frequencies lower than 100Hz and higher than 10kHz; lower volume for low frequency sounds that fill the spectrum from 100Hz to 1kHz, peak at something like -20db (worked good for click sounds); higher volume for high frequency sounds >1kHz (for example synth mallets), peak at -6 to -1db; also higher volume for short musical jingles or other full spectrum sounds like hits or big chords
that works really well on all my tested devices, from galaxy ace to a htc m8. the nexus 9 sounds like a tin can but that seems to be normal :/
my questions:
what do you think about that, do you feel the same pain with your sounds on android devices?
am i on the right way?
shouldn't google care more about audio quality?
any advice/guideline/links?