How to make a variable length sound in Android - android

I am trying to make an app that plays a sound like a piano organ. When the user presses a button it will play a piano-like sound. The difficulty is that the user could hold their finger down for any length of time. When they lift their finger off the should fade rather than stop abruptly.
I've played with SoundPool and Media Player but they don't seem suitable.
There are a lot of piano apps out there... does anyone know how they solve this problem?

You'll want to use the AudioTrack class. The basic usage is to write your sound data using AudioTrack's write() method for whatever duration that you want it to be heard. You'll need to use a separate thread for each simultaneous voice that you want to "play".
Here's the AudioTrack reference page and here's a blog entry where the author does a nice job of showing what to do without a lot of distractions.

Related

Create a silent mp3 using TTS

My application needs to run a silent mp3 in background.
I use TTS synthesizetofile() to convert text to mp3 and TTS playsilence() for playing silence.
While I can easily convert normal text to mp3 I cant figure out an easy way to play silence.
For those who would suggest don't play anything for x duration and that will be silence...it will not solve my objective. Because if nothing is being played that would allow other sound application to assume that nothing is being played while here I need a silent pause.
Secondly, when nothing is being played, android by default shuts down the application.
Also, the solution is not to create a silent mp3 file manually and put into the application because the pause keeps varying and also dependent on values chosen by the user.
Also, TTS playsilence will not do the job because android does not consider it as background music application and shuts it down in like 5 seconds.
Thanks!
I found a solution myself and sharing for those who would come looking for it here...
Use the same TTS.synthesizetofile() method but instead of text use the text in code below:
<speak version="1.1" ><break time="1500ms" /></speak>
replace 1500ms here with any duration you want either in seconds or milliseconds like "3s" or "3000ms"

MediaPlayer -- how to separate a narration track?

I'm working on an android app that plays video (using video view). the video is meant to have both music (left and right) and narration, but I want to selectively be able to turn off the narration track in the MediaPlayer.
Is the way to do this correctly to encode by mp4 video file with 3 audio tracks (right left and narration) and then turn off the naration audio track with deselectTrack()?
Not clear to me from the documentation that MediaPlayer can handle more than 2 audio tracks.
If the audio tracks are limited to 2, would it make sense to run two media player simultaneously (synching them up with seekTo())when I want the narration track to play?
Thanks.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but...
1) You have a misunderstanding about what a "track" denotes. A track can have multiple channels (e.g., a stereo track has left and right channels). As I understand it, stereo is the extent of the Android AudioTrack implementation at present. I haven't yet checked if the OpenSL implementation is more extensive than the Java API.
2) Only 1 audio track can be selected at a time, so you wouldn't be able to have background and narration simultaneously in the way you were thinking.
3) Audio tracks can only be selected in the prepared state (i.e., not after playback has started). The documentation mentions this limitation is not ideal, so it will probably change in the future. If not for this problem, your goal could be accomplished with two audio tracks encoded in the stream, one with both background & narration, the other just background.
You will probably find it difficult to synchronize two MediaPlayers, but I haven't tried. Maybe this approach would be acceptable for your situation, although be forewarned the seekTo method isn't accurate. It depends on the encoding of the files.
Something I would try if I were you is to have two complete encoded videos, one with narration, the other without. Use two MediaPlayers and keep them both prepared. When you want to switch use seekTo to put the correct one at (or near) the desired location. That way you don't have to worry about synchronization. If the video is large, this method could use significantly more resources, though.

How to synchronize sound playback in android?

I'm writing my first android app, trying to playback two 10min soundfiles synchronously (imagine an instrumental track and an acapella), to be able to change the volume of each track independently). I am using two MediaPlayers for this, since a SoundPool is targeted at shorter audio samples as far as I read.
Now my problem is that, when pausing and resuming the playback, sometimes the players are not synchronous anymore, even though I set their positions to the same value before resuming playback.
I know that this is kind of inevitable, because they cannot be started at exactly the same moment and they may require different amounts of time for starting playback, but: Is there maybe any other approach to meet my requirements?
You can take a look at JetPlayer, this may accomplish what you want as far as synchronization.
To use it you create audio channels (your instrument channel and vocal channel) as MIDI files in a track and the player can keep them synchronized while allowing you to mute or unmute the different channels as appropriate.
The user guide for creating JET resouces can be found here.

How do I stop the sound restarting when a collision occurs

Currently my code plays a sound when there is contact between any objects in my game using andEngine and Box2D and the walls, the problem I have is that when contact is made with any objects it starts again I understand why this is happening. What I want to do if possible is keep playing the sound while also playing it for another collision. I think I may need to use threads but I am unsure how to do this in java for android.
#Override
public void beginContact(Contact contact)
{
Rattle.this.mExplosionSound.play();
}
UPDATE: I don't seem to have been able to fix the issue but I know that what I need to do is play this sound multiple times simultaneously, I have tried threads and the soundPool but got no luck with either still not sure what to do.
It seems you have only one instance of the sound. Then you call play on the same sound twice, therefore it stops playing and starts from the beginning.
Imagine having one CD player - you press play, the music starts to play. You press play again and the player starts reading the track from the beginning. What you need is two players, therefore you may need two instances of the same sound.
(I don't have much experience with sound on Android so I may be wrong, please take the advice with a grain of salt.)
Even I was developing a game some time back and I found a similar problem. You should use SoundPool to play short sounds like crashing and collisions. here are some good linkswhich helped me. Link 1, link 2.

Modulate a recorded sound into different effects in android?

I'm going to make an app related to sound modulation , where i need to record a sound and after recording the sound i need to play it in different modulation or sound effects like Reversing,Resampling,Pitchshifting,Robatization effect when I press the play button .Now I have the code to record a sound ,but don't know how to modulate the recorder sound as the above effects.
I search the whole web but did not find any solution.how do i implement this effects?
There are many apis which helps to accomplish this. For example-
Open SLES. AudioTrack.
Please have a look at this page.
I think it may help you.

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