iPhone/Qt: UDP Voice using AudioQueue/QAudioOutput

Qt 4.6 Introduces QtMultimedia with support for raw audio input/output, while Mac OS X and iPhone OS has well known CoreAudio/AudioQueue from a long time.

This example show how to implement a really rudimentary VOIP between an iOS (iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad) and a Desktop (using Qt). To simplify the example is just unidirectional iOS to Qt, because doing Qt to iOS part is just the specular code.

The idea is very simple, Fetch the sample data from the microphone, and send over UDP. No compression no packet number just send raw data in simple way as possible.

On iOS we've AudioQueueNewInput() that creates a new recording audio queue object, and AudioQueueNewOutput() that creates a new playback audio queue object.

The specular Qt 4.6+ classes are QAudioInput class that provides an interface for receiving audio data from an audio input device, and QAudioOutput class that provides an interface for sending audio data to an audio output device. To handle audio samples we can easily wrap QIODevice read() and write() calls.

The source code is really easy. iOS code contains AudioRecorder.h/AudioRecorder.m that is a C code that wrap AudioQueue Input to record a stream, with a callback handler to intercept packet data. The Qt4 Source code contains just  a QIODevice Wrapper that read from UDP and prepare for QAudioOutputStream. It's really really simple, but gives you an idea.

The Source code is available here, and contains both Qt 4.6+ and iOS sources: iPhone/Qt UDP Voice Source Code.

Note: Due to a QTBUG-8878 we cannot use 8, 16, 24 KHz Frequency. Will be fixed in Qt 4.6.4.