sound pool not finish playing entire file - android

I have two issues I would like understand.
I am using soundPool for my sound effects and its working with no problem.
However, when I try to play cetain file (25 sec , about 400K) it doesn't play the whole file only 3-4 seconds from it .
Why and how can I fix it ?
and the second question is, should I play each effect from thread ? many threads are good ?
this is the current code :
static void play(final int soundID ){
if(loaded){
handler.post(new Runnable()
{
public void run()
{
soundpool.play(soundID, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1);
}
});

My understanding is that SoundPool cannot be used for sounds longer than several seconds or audio files >1MB. Use MediaPlayer in those cases.
Either use this for each play of a sound:
MediaPlayer.create(YourActivity.this, R.raw.your_sound).start();
or create MediaPlayer object, play same sound as many times as needed, then release() the object.

Related

Play sound precisely every one second

I am learning to code for Android and I have a problem with... maybe performance?
I want to play very short sound every second. I have created a CountDownTimer (with tick interval 20ms so very accurate) and putted there in onTick to play it. But the sound is played not precisely after one second and I can hear this - this is the problem...
fragment of my code:
private class ExerciseCountDownTimer extends CountDownTimer
{
...
public void onTick(long millisUntilFinished)
{
...
if(/*this is a next second not just a tick*/)
playSound(R.raw.quick_rest, true);
}
}
private void playSound(int resId, boolean releaseAfter)
{
if (currentMediaPlayerRes != resId || mediaPlayer == null)
{
if (mediaPlayer != null)
{
if (mediaPlayer.isPlaying())
mediaPlayer.stop();
mediaPlayer.reset();
mediaPlayer.release();
}
currentMediaPlayerRes = resId;
mediaPlayer = MediaPlayer.create(this, resId);
if (releaseAfter)
{
mediaPlayer.setOnCompletionListener(new MediaPlayer.OnCompletionListener()
{
#Override
public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp)
{
mediaPlayer.release();
mediaPlayer = null;
}
});
}
}
mediaPlayer.start();
}
Is it possible to have counter like this?
use this code to play a music one time
MediaPlayer AlarmMusic;
AlarmMusic = MediaPlayer.create(G.context, R.raw.music1);
AlarmMusic.setLooping(false);
AlarmMusic.start();
this worked for me !
Because of the lack of real time guarantees in Java/Android, using one thread to cue another probably will always have some inaccuracy.
I can think of two approaches that might work for you:
(1) make the sound file exactly 1 second long, e.g., 44100 frames at 44100 fps, if you are using the standard "CD-quality" format that Java supports. The sound file can probably be edited with Audacity to an exact frame length. Then, use a looping playback.
(2) Open a line for streaming audio. I can't recall exactly what the Android-supported command is for this, but I know it exists. With it, count elapsing frames while sending silence (bytes with 0 value). When you get to the 44100th frame, start feeding the PCM data that you wish to hear. When it is done, go back to feeding 0's until the next 44100 frame arrives. Never stop the line--keep it running in its own thread, probably with a high priority. It is generally okay to give audio a high priority (as long as you are doing nothing else on the line) as audio spends a vast majority of its time in a "blocked" state during which it is yielding to other lines.
A fellow on java-gaming.org made a metronome and got it working on Android. I bet if you search for "metronome" on that site, his thread will pop up and have some useful info. He basically used the second approach that I described above.

How to play sounds at accurate periods of time across different devices in Android

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.

Pause/Stop MediaPlayer Android at given time programmatically

I researched a little bit, but couldn't find any solutions to this problem:
I would like to play a MediaPlayer and pause/stop it at a given time.. (ie: play from second 6 to second 17).
I know that I can set its starting point with seekTo() method, but can I pause/stop it from playing by setting an end point (of course, before reaching the file end limit)?
There are different ways you could do this, here's one:
int startFrom = 6000;
int endAt = 11000;
MediaPlayer mp;
Runnable stopPlayerTask = new Runnable(){
#Override
public void run() {
mp.pause();
}};
#Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
setContentView(R.layout.activity_main);
mp = MediaPlayer.create(this, R.raw.my_sound_file);
mp.seekTo(startFrom);
mp.start();
Handler handler = new Handler();
handler.postDelayed(stopPlayerTask, endAt);
}
The mediaplayer will start playing 6 seconds in and pause it 11 seconds after that (at second 17).
I think you can create Timer and call seekTo() directly from its task. Then call stop()/pause() inside of that Timer Task.
Maybe this post will be helpfull for you.
Or you can use handler for this task, like Ken Wolf shows you.
Best wishes.
You can use CountDownTimer
new CountDownTimer(30000, 1000) {
public void onTick(long millisUntilFinished) {
}
public void onFinish() {
mp.stop;
mp.relese();
}
}.start();
I know this already has an answer but here is an alternative for anyone wanting to do this efficiently for a video with controls.
I saw a different answer that involved constantly checking the position.
Note that this assumes that you do not need a lot of different portions of one video. Even in that case I suggest to follow the below.
If you only need to play a portion of the video and want it to end somewhere, then why not just use free video editing software and clip the end? You can still start it from anywhere using seekTo() but this way you don't have to waste resources checking for a certain position (video with controls).
If you do not have video player controls the accepted answer will work. But if you do have player controls then it would not since a user could pause and play the video.
There's a time difference between videoView.start() and video prepared to play depend on video format, those time difference is probably more than 10 frames.
so the best way to do is to start the timer inside OnPreparedListener to minimise the time difference, or even more to get the current playing duration and set a postDelayed timer at that point.

Reliable sequential audio playback on Android

I am writing an android game for teaching kids to count. The instructions are read to the player through sound clips that are put together to form sentences (for instance "Place", "one", "cow", "in the", "barn". This requires a certain amount of reliability when it comes to latency so that the flow of the instructions sounds natural.
Currently I am using MediaPlayer, playing each sound in a OnCompletionListener. Each sound has it's own MediaPlayer that is created and prepared before playback of any sound starts (to reduce latency) - but still I get a significant delay before each sound the first time it is played (the second time it seems some sort of caching has taken place and it works fine).
The sounds are not many and very short and it should probably work better with SoundPool, but SoundPool has no way of knowing when an audio is complete and thus not an option.
Does anyone have any experience with similar problems and a viable solution?
I have used handler with OnCompletionListener and it worked fine for me to give delay between two sounds.
this way,
CommonMethod.player.setOnCompletionListener(new OnCompletionListener() {
#Override
public void onCompletion(MediaPlayer mp) {
// /will use count and loop as per number of
// repetition chosen.
handler.postDelayed(new Runnable() {
public void run() {
if (counter >= limit) {
CommonMethod.player.stop();
} else {
CommonMethod.player.start();
}
counter++;
}
}, 3000);
}
});

Android SoundPool sometimes plays sound twice when loop param is set to 0

Here is what I'm doing:
private SoundPool pool;
private int soundId;
#Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
// new SoundPool with three channels, STREAM_MUSIC, default quality
pool = new SoundPool(3, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 0);
// load sound with current context, click resource, priority 1
soundId = pool.load(this, R.raw.click, 1);
// originally I wasn't using this but it seemed to help a bit
// set no loop for soundId
pool.setLoop(soundId, 0);
}
private void play()
{
Log.v(TAG, "Play the sound once!");
// half volume L & R, priority 1, loop 0, rate 1
pool.play(soundId, 0.5f, 0.5f, 1, 0, 1);
}
#Override
public void onDestroy()
{
super.onDestroy();
// release the pool
pool.release();
}
Originally I was using a .wav file for the click sound and the problem would occur 90% of the time. I added setLoop and it appears to reduce it a tiny bit.
I thought it might be a problem with loading .wav files so I converted the file to .mp3. Now the problem happens 5% of the time, but it still happens. I built with and without the setLoop call and it appears that including it helps a tiny bit.
As you can see I have added a debug log message to ensure that I am not accidentally calling the play function twice. According to the log output, the sound is only played once but I hear the sound twice.
I have also used several different sound files. Some of the files seem to repeat more frequently than others. I don't see any correlations except it happens more frequently with .wav files.
I see the problem happening on Samsung Continuum running 2.1 (min & target API: level 7). I haven't experienced any extra looping with any market apps I've downloaded on the same device. Unfortunately, I don't have other devices to test with.
I have only found one other person experiencing this issue and he or she was also using a Samsung device.
Here is a link to the other issue reported:
https://stackoverflow.com/q/4873995/695336
At this point I guess I'll try making a release build to see if it still happens and then maybe convert to .ogg format. After that I'll probably try switching to MediaPlayer to see if I get the same results.
Thanks for your help.

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