I'm using soundpool in the game I'm developing. It plays piano notes most of the time playing several notes simultaneously. On some of the phones, the notes play very well. On the other hand when I tested on another phone some of the notes don't play. To investigate the problem, I've written the following code to understand the origin of the problem. There are 85 notes that play sequentially. When the delay between the notes is about 1 seconds, the notes play well without any skip or delay. This show all the samples are loaded without any error. But when I reduce the delay to 100ms, the notes start to overlap and after playing several notes sequentially in a proper way, the soundpool stops and waits the samples to finish before playing the remaining notes. On the other hand on another phone, even when the delay is 100ms all the notes play properly. Since the maximum number of streams is 100, the soundpool should play all the notes even if they are played simultaneously. I also checked the memory while running the following code and there weren't any overloading.
I have been working on this problem for a couple of days, so if you help me I'd appreciate it greatly.
spl=new SoundPool(100, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 0));
Handler handler = new Handler();
Runnable runnable = new Runnable() {
int cnt1=0,cnt2=0;
#Override
public void run() {
cnt1=cnt1+1;
if (cnt1>10){
stream=spl.play(sndIds[cnt2],volumesToBePlayed.get(i), volumesToBePlayed.get(i),1,0,1f);
Log.i("playing", String.valueOf(cnt2) + " " + String.valueOf(stream));
cnt1=0;
cnt2=cnt2+1;
}
if(cnt2>= sndIds.lenght){
handler.removeCallbacks(this);
} else {
handler.postDelayed(this, 100);
}
}
};
runnable.run();
EDIT: After investigating the problem a bit more, I've noticed that some phones are able to play more simultaneous samples than the others. In the piano applications, like mine, if there would be many simultaneous or overlapping play actions, I think, it is not a good idea to make the max number of streams large since the soundpool skips the notes played when the full capacity is reached. When the maximum is below the capacity of the phone, soundpool dosn't skip the new sound but stop the already playing and the oldest streams first if their priorities are the same. This sounds less disturbing to the user. I solved the problem by reducing the max number of streams to 12.
Related
When I play a sound in my app it comes off as clippy and distorted. Here is a recording: recording.
Here is the sound file as it was uploaded to android studio: success sound cue
Here is the function that calls the sound from the .raw
public void playCorrectAnswerSound() {
final MediaPlayer mp = MediaPlayer.create(this, R.raw.correct);
mp.start();
}
Heres how I call it:
Thread t = new Thread(){
public void run(){
playCorrectAnswerSound();
}
};
t.start()
This is my first time debugging a sound related issue. I don't know what else to include in this post, so if you need more info please say so.
EDIT: I was asked to record more of the distortion. Here it is. Also I should say that after more testing, my physical device lacks the sound distortion while the sound distortion is present on 3 different emulators.
I'm going to say this is stuttering due to underrun (starvation) of the MediaPlayer's internal playback buffer. That is, the MediaPlayer can't supply data fast enough to keep up with the sound hardware (which suggests a severe lack of processing power). If the buffer starves, it'll start to play back old data (because it's a circular buffer). This causes a sharp phase transition, which sounds like a "click". Presumably the MediaPlayer recovers quickly enough that the "correct" sound resumes playing shortly thereafter.
Here is a picture of the spectrum from Audacity. 0-4KHz. The first row is the clean .mp3; the next four rows are the distorted recordings (in no particular order). All rows have been aligned in time, and are roughly the same amplitude. The large vertical stripes in the last four rows represent the distortion/clicks that you hear.
I'm developing a game in Android and I came across a very annoying, hard-to-find bug. The issue is that when you are using SoundPool to play your sounds, you can actually loop whatever sound you are playing. In this case, the issue is the "running steps" sound; this sound gets executed quite fast and continually (around every 400ms) when the main character is running.
Now when playing the sound on a regular (not so powerful) device e.g. Samsung SII, the sound is played every 500ms - however, if I run the very same code on another device (let's say, Samsung SIV, Samsung SIII), the sound plays twice or even three times faster.
It seems like the more powerful the device hardware specs are, the faster it plays. On some devices, it plays so fast that you almost hear one solid continuous sound. I've been looking for techniques to set a specific ratio on the time period between sound plays, but it doesn't work properly and the issue remains. Does anyone know how to fix it, either using SoundPool, MediaPlayer, or any other sound-controlling API on Android?
You could use an AudioTrack to play a continuous stream of PCM data, since you would pass a stream you could be sure about the interval between sounds. the downside could be a little delay when first starting the sound but it depends on the minimum buffer size, and it depends, I think, on android version and device. On my galaxy s2 android 4.1 it was about 20ms.if you think this could be an option I can post some code
The problem with just looping or using a regular interval for something like footsteps is that you have a possible decoupling of sound and visuals. If your sound gets delays or sped up, or your visuals get delayed or sped up, you would have to adjust for that delay dynamically and automatically. You already have that issue right here
A better solution would be to place a trigger on the exact event which should trigger the sound (in this case, the foot being placed down), which then plays the sound. This also means that if you have multiple sources of the sound (like multiple footsteps), you don't have to manually start the sound with the right interval.
I can't seem to replicate the issue on Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S, does that mean I fixed it? Or maybe you could show what you're doing differently from this:
SoundPool soundPool = new SoundPool(4, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 100);
Integer sound1 = soundPool.load(this, R.raw.file1, 1);
Integer sound2 = soundPool.load(this, R.raw.file2, 1);
playSound(sound1);
public void playSound(int sound) {
AudioManager mgr = (AudioManager)getSystemService(Context.AUDIO_SERVICE);
float volume = mgr.getStreamVolume(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC)
/ mgr.getStreamMaxVolume(AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC);
soundPool.play(sound, volume, volume, 1, -1, 1.0f);
}
If the problem is that you want to control the interval between the discrete sounds, The easiest way to do this is with a handler.
Basically you start a sound playing which is an asynchronous process. Then you use a handler to schedule a message to play the next sound sometime in the future. It will take some trial and error to get it right, but you will be guaranteed that the sound will start at the same interval after the previous sound on every device.
Here is some code to illustrate what I am talking about.
Here is a handler implementation you could use:
handler = new Handler() {
/* (non-Javadoc)
* #see android.os.Handler#handleMessage(android.os.Message)
*/
#Override
public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
if (msg.what == NEXT_ITEM_MSG) {
playNextSound();
}
else if (msg.what == SEQUENCE_COMPLETE_MSG) {
// notify a listener
listener.onSoundComplete()
}
}
};
Then you could write playNextSound like this:
private void playNextSound() {
if (mRunning) {
// Get the first item
SoundSequenceItem item = currentSequence.getNextSequenceItem();
if (item == null) {
Message msg = handler.obtainMessage(SEQUENCE_COMPLETE_MSG);
handler.sendMessage(msg);
return;
}
// Play the sound
int iSoundResId = item.getSoundResId();
if (iSoundResId != -1) {
player.playSoundNow(soundResId);
}
// schedule a message to advance to next item after duration
Message msg = handler.obtainMessage(NEXT_ITEM_MSG);
handler.sendMessageDelayed(msg, item.getDuration());
}
}
and your SoundSequenceItem could just be a simple class that has a sound file resource id and a duration. If you want to keep playing the sound while the character is moving you could do something like this:
public void onSoundComplete() {
if (character.isRunning()) {
currentSequence.addSequenceItem(new SoundSequenceItem(R.id.footsteps,500);
playNextSound();
}
}
Or you could modify playNextSound to continually play the same sound. Mine is written this way to be able to play different sounds in sequence.
I have had a lot of problems developing apps which used sounds and stuff like that. I would not suggest you to use SoundPool since it is bug-affected, and also be aware that looping sounds with SoundPool won't work on devices which are 4.3 and higher, see this open issue, at AOSP - Issue tracker.
I think that the solution is to go native and use OpenSL ES o similar libraries.
I have created a metronome-type application with a specified swing interval of 750 milliseconds on the pendulum and playing a single audio file at the maximum swing arc... repeating the swinging of the pendulum and playing of the sound indefinitely. However, I am finding that the actual timing of execution of the code varies dramatically from device-to-device and even performs with variance on a single device. My intent is to swing the pendulum at the rate of 80 beats per minute and play the audio file with each "beat". I adjusted the 750 millisecond setting to accommodate the time required to play the audio file. This slightly reduced the millisecond setting from 750 down to about 680. I tested using various devices and found that the results of a one minute run of the metronome performed dramatically differently for timing as I tested with various Android devices even though I am defining my timing elements based on milliseconds.
I am using Android SoundPool to access a .wav file to play the sound.
I found quite a few references to Soundpool timing issues and concerns but have not yet found a viable and reliable solution to deliver consistent timing for an application like this.
It seems that the swing of the pendulum is pretty consistent based on the specified delay so I believe the variation is due to variable timing during execution of the SoundPool code playing the audio. Is there a reliable way to execute code to play sounds on a consistent and "exact" timing interval with Android?
One way to do this is a handler. This allows you to start the audio clip at exactly the same time regardless of how long the clip actually takes to play. You don't need SoundPool for this, just SoundPlayer.
A handler allows you to schedule a message to be delivered to your code some time in the future. Since playing a sound with SoundPlayer is asynchronous, you can use this simple mechanism to play a sound on a regular interval.
Here is some code to show how it might work.
handler = new Handler() {
/* (non-Javadoc)
* #see android.os.Handler#handleMessage(android.os.Message)
*/
#Override
public void handleMessage(Message msg) {
if (msg.what == NEXT_SOUND_MSG) {
playNextSound()
}
}
};
// Set up media player for sounds
player = new SoundPlayer(context);
player.start();
private void playNextSound() {
if (mRunning) {
// Play the sound
int iSoundResId = item.getSoundResId();
if (iSoundResId != -1) {
playSound(iSoundResId);
}
// schedule a message to advance to next item after duration
Message msg = handler.obtainMessage(NEXT_SOUND_MSG);
handler.sendMessageDelayed(msg, interval);
}
}
When using MediaPlayer, I noticed that whenever my phone stucks, the MediaPlayer glitches and then continues playing from the position in the audio it glitched.
This is bad for my implementation since I want the audio to be played at a specific time.
If I have a song of 1000 millisecond length, I want is the ability to set MediaPlayer to start playing at some specific time t, and then exactly stop at at time t+1000.
This means that I actually need two things:
1) Start MediaPlayer at a specific time with a very small delay.
2) Making MediaPlayer glitches ignore the audio they glitched on and continue playing in order to finish the song on time.
The delay of the functions is very important to me and I need the audio to be played exactly(~) at the time it was supposed to be played.
Thanks!
You will need to use possibly mp.getDuration(); and/or mp.getCurrentPosition(); although it's impossible to know exactly what you mean by "I need the audio to be played exactly(~) at the time it was supposed to be played."
Something like this should get you started:
int a = (mp.getCurrentPosition() + b);
Thanks for the answer Mike. but unfortunately this won't help me. Let's say that I asked MediaPlayer to start playing a song of length 3:45 at 00:00. At 01:00 I started using the phone's resources, due to the heavy usage my phone glitched making MediaPlayer pause for 2 seconds.
Time:
00:00-01:00 - I heard the audio at 00:00-01:00
01:00-01:02 - I heard silence because the phone glitched
01:02-03:47 - I heard the audio at 01:00-03:45 with 2 second time skew
Now from what I understood MediaPlayer is a bad choice of usage on this problem domain, since MediaPlayer provides a high level API.I am currently experimenting with the
AudioTrack class which should provide me with what I need:
//Creating a new audio track
AudioTrack audioTrack = new AudioTrack(...)
//Get start time
long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
// loop until finished
for (...) {
// Get time in song
long now = System.currentTimeMillis();
long nowInSong = now - start;
// get a buffer from the song at time nowInSong with a length of 1 second
byte[] b = getAudioBuffer(nowInSong);
// play 1 second of music
audioTrack.write(b, 0, b.length);
// remove any unplayed data
audioTrack.flush();
}
Now if I glitch I only glitch for 1 second and then I correct myself by playing the right audio at the right time!
NOTE
I haven't tested this code but it seems like the right way to do it. If it will actually work I will update this post again.
P.S. seeking in MediaPlayer is:
1. A heavy operation that will surely delay my music (every millisecond counts here)
2. Is not thread safe and cannot be used from multiple threads (seeks, starts etc...)
I am programming for android 2.2 and am trying to using the
SoundPool class to play several sounds simultaneously but at what feel like random times sound will stop coming out of the speakers.
for each sound that would have been played this is printed in the logcat:
AudioFlinger could not create track. status: -12
Error creating AudioTrack
Audio track delete
No exception is thrown and the program continues to execute without any changes except for the lack of volume. I've had a really hard time tracking down what conditions cause the error or recreating it after it happens. I can't find the error in the documentation anywhere and am pretty much at a loss.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Edit: I forgot to mention that I am loading mp3 files, not ogg.
i had almost this exact same problem with some sounds i was attempting to load and play recently.
i even broke it down to loading a single mp3 that was causing this error.
one thing i noted: when i loaded with a loop of -1, it would fail with the "status 12" error, but when i loaded it to loop 0 times, it would succeed. even attempting to load 1 time failed.
the final solution was to open the mp3 in an audio editor and re-edit it with slightly lesser quality so that the file is now smaller, and doesn't seem to take up quite as many resources in the system.
finally, there is this discussion that encourages performing a release on the objects you are using, because there is indeed a hard limit on the resources that can be used, and it is system-wide, so if you use several of the resources, other apps will not be able to use them.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/android-platform/tyITQ09vV3s/discussion%5B1-25%5D
For audio, there's a hard limit of 32 active AudioTrack objects per
device (not per app: you need to share those 32 with rest of the system), and AudioTrack is used internally beneath SoundPool,
ToneGenerator, MediaPlayer, native audio based on OpenSL ES, etc. But
the actual AudioTrack limit is < 32; it depends more on soft factors
such as memory, CPU load, etc. Also note that the limiter in the
Android audio mixer does not currently have dynamic range compression,
so it is possible to clip if you have a large number of active sounds
and they're all loud.
For video players the limit is much much lower due to the intense load
that video puts on the device.
I'll use this as an opportunity to remind media developers: please
remember to call release() for media objects when your app is paused.
This frees up the underlying resources that other apps will need.
Don't rely on the media objects being cleaned up in finalize by the
garbage collector, as that has unpredictable timing.
I had a similar issue where the music tracker within my Android game would drop notes and I got the Audioflinger error (although my status was -22). I got it working however so this might help some people.
The problem occurred when a single sample was being output multiple times simultaneously. So in my case it was a single sample being played on two or more tracks. This seemed to occasionally deadlock or something and one of the two notes would be dropped. The solution was to have two copies of the sample (two actual ogg files - identical but both in the assets). Then on each track even although I was playing the same sample, it was coming from a different file. This totally fixed the issue for me.
Not sure why it works as I cache the samples into memory, but even loading the same file into two different sounds didn't fix it. Only when the samples came out of two different files did the errors go away.
I'm sure this won't help everyone and it's not the prettiest fix but it might help someone.
john.k.doe is right. You must reduce the size of your mp3 file. You should keep the size under 100kb per file. I had to reduce my 200kb file to 72kb using a constante bit rate(CBR) of 32kbps instead of the usual 128kbps. That worked for me!
Try
final ToneGenerator tg = new ToneGenerator(AudioManager.STREAM_NOTIFICATION, 50);
tg.startTone(ToneGenerator.TONE_PROP_BEEP, 200);
tg.release();
Releasing should keep your resources.
I was with this problem. In order to solve it i run the method .release() of SoundPool object after finish playing the sound.
Here's my code:
SoundPool pool = new SoundPool(10, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 50);
final int teste = pool.load(this.ctx,this.soundS,1);
pool.setOnLoadCompleteListener(new OnLoadCompleteListener(){
#Override
public void onLoadComplete(SoundPool sound,int sampleId,int status){
pool.play(teste, 20,20, 1, 0, 1);
new Thread(new Runnable(){
#Override
public void run(){
try {
Thread.sleep(2000);
pool.release();
} catch (InterruptedException e) { e.printStackTrace(); }
}
}).start();
}
});
Note that in my case my sounds had length 1-2 seconds max, so i put the value of 2000 miliseconds in Thread.sleep(), in order to only release the resources after the player have had finished.
Like said above, there is a problem with looping: when I set repeat to -1 I get this error, but with 0 everything is working properly.
I've noticed that some sounds give this error when I'm trying to play them one by one. For example:
mSoundPool.stop(mStreamID);
mStreamID = mSoundPool.play(mRandID, mVolume, mVolume, 1, -1, 1f);
In such case, first track is played ok, but when I switch sounds, next track gives this error. It seems that using looping, a buffer is somehow overloaded, and mSoundPool.stop cannot release resources immediately.
Solution:
final Handler handler = new Handler();
handler.postDelayed(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
mStreamID = mSoundPool.play(mRandID, mVolume, mVolume, 1, -1, 1f);
}, 350);
And it's working, but delay is different for different devices.
In my case, reducing the quality and thereby the file sizes of the MP3's to under 100kb wasn't sufficient, as some 51kb files worked while some longer duration 41kb files still did not.
What helped us was reducing the sample rate from 44100 to 22050 or shortening the duration to less than 5 seconds.
I see too many overcomplicated answer. Error -12 means that you did not release the variables.
I had the same problem after I played an OGG audio file 8 times.
This worked for me:
SoundPoolPlayer onBeep; //Global variable
if(onBeep!=null){
onBeep.release();
}
onBeep = SoundPoolPlayer.create(getContext(), R.raw.micon);
onBeep.setOnCompletionListener(
new MediaPlayer.OnCompletionListener() {
#Override
public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp) { //mp will be null here
loge("ON Beep! END");
startGoogleASR_API_inner();
}
}
);
onBeep.play();
Releasing the variable right after .play() would mess things up, and it is not possible to release the variable inside onCompletion, so notice how I release the variable before using it(and checking for null to avoid nullpointer exceptions).
It works like charm!
A single soundPool has an internal memory limitation of 1 (one) Mb. You might be hitting this if your sound is very high quality. If you have many sounds and are hitting this limit, just create more soundpools, and distribute your sounds across them.
You may not even be able to reach the hard track limit if you are running out of memory before you get there.
That error not only appears when the stream or track limit has been reached, but also the memory limit. Soundpool will stop playing old and/or de-prioritized sounds in order to play a new sound.