I'm building a scrolling shooter with libgdx. in windows, everything runs just fine, but on android i get noticeable jitter and the framerate drops from 61 fps avg without sound to 48-56 fps avg with sound. it plays a lot of small sound effects concurrently as there are a lot of bullets to fire and enemies to hit at once. my sound routine:
import com.badlogic.gdx.Gdx;
import com.badlogic.gdx.audio.Sound;
public class SoundFX {
static final int BGDIE = 1, BGHIT = 2, BGLASER = 3, BGSPAWN = 4, PDIE = 5, PHIT = 6, PLASER = 7, PSPAWN = 8, PAUSE = 9;
Sound S_BGDIE, S_BGHIT, S_BGLASER, S_BGSPAWN, S_PDIE, S_PHIT, S_PLASER, S_PSPAWN, S_PAUSE;
public void load()
{
S_BGDIE = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/badguydie.mp3"));
S_BGHIT = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/badguygothit.mp3"));
S_BGLASER = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/badguylaser.mp3"));
S_BGSPAWN = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/badguyspawn.mp3"));
S_PDIE = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/playerdie.mp3"));
S_PHIT = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/playergothit.mp3"));
S_PLASER = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/playerlaser.mp3"));
S_PSPAWN = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/playerspawn.mp3"));
S_PAUSE = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/sfx/pause.mp3"));
}
public void unload()
{
S_BGDIE.dispose();
S_BGHIT.dispose();
S_BGLASER.dispose();
S_BGSPAWN.dispose();
S_PDIE.dispose();
S_PHIT.dispose();
S_PLASER.dispose();
S_PSPAWN.dispose();
S_PAUSE.dispose();
}
public void play(int id)
{
switch(id)
{
case BGDIE:
S_BGDIE.play();
break;
case BGHIT:
S_BGHIT.play();
break;
case BGLASER:
S_BGLASER.play();
break;
case BGSPAWN:
S_BGSPAWN.play();
break;
case PDIE:
S_PDIE.play();
break;
case PHIT:
S_PHIT.play();
break;
case PLASER:
S_PLASER.play();
break;
case PSPAWN:
S_PSPAWN.play();
break;
case PAUSE:
S_PAUSE.play();
break;
default:
System.out.println("invalid sfx call");
break;
}
}
}
play gets called roughly 4-10 times a second depending on what's happening in the game, the sound effects are less than a second in duration and on avarage 8kb each.
what's going on here, and how can i fix this? it makes the game look very unprofessional and on hard levels almost unplayable.
A little background into the problem about why you notice such a big drop in performance when playing multiple sounds. This is because underneath the covers libgdx needs to mix the sounds together before playing them back to the user. When you get to a certain number of sounds running concurrently the demands on the system to do the mixing becomes noticeably high. Since you are likely trying the play sounds on the rendering thread this increase in demand results in a drop in framerate.
In my experience with any sort of sound effects in games, when you encounter a situation where you have a lot of small sounds playing concurrently there are few solutions. I will write these as more general solutions than specifics for libGDX:
1) Play all sounds on a single thread
This is what you are currently doing, while it doesn't work well once a large number of sounds playing it is easy to implement and for most situations it works. However, once you get enough sounds playing together you will notice lag and poor quality.
2) Play sounds on a separate thread from the rendering thread
This is one possible approach (and depending on if the framework allows), its not very good because it doesn't scale well. However, if you are only suffering minor performance loss and aren't expecting to play a huge number (~20+) of sounds concurrently this is a relatively minor change and will usually fix the problem.
3) Play sounds upto a cap
This solution is a bit more work, and may not be acceptable if you have sounds which must be played. You simply track the number of sounds playing and allow for additional sounds to be played until you hit a certain point. Anything above the cap is simply not played. This allows you to guarantee a certain level of performance. The biggest downside to this method is if you play a sound when your character is critically injured and it doesn't get played, then this may upset the user as they could be listening for the sound to know if they are going to die soon, but instead find themselves dead.
4) Selectively play important sounds
This is a bit more difficult to implement but it works extremely well as you are essentially setting a cap on performance. What you would want to do is determine the priority for a sound to be played. Is it close to you? Is it loud? Is it important? Then, you only play sounds which are important enough to play upto a certain cap (could be 4, 6, 8, etc). You would also need to keep track of how many sounds are currently playing to determine how many new sounds you can play at a given point.
A work-around: the sounds that are less important to be played to the player, you can play them only if the current FPS is above a certain value. For example:
if (Gdx.graphics.getFramesPerSecond() > 56) playSound();
And important sounds should always be played, no matter the FPS value.
Related
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.
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 am using Python Kivy for an Android Game. I want to play a sound on an event
sound = SoundLoader.load("sound.wav")
def onEvent():
sound.play()
, and It works. But now the problem: Of course an event can, and in my case will happen again before the sound is done playing from the last event. And as the sounds are based on a play/pause idea I am getting a problem playing multiple sounds of the same object at once. That can be solved like this for first:
onEvent():
SoundLoader.load("sound.wav").play()
As this creates a new object all the time, and so is able to play it the same time another event plays the sound. But the problem using this method is quite obvious, because the sound must be loaded everytime the event occurs, and so causes a delay until it's played.
Is there a more useful way to do this?
{ if you don't understand what I am talking about, or just don't see the problem, feel free to ask }
You can workaround this by loading multiple instances of the sound.
For instance
sounds = [SoundLoader.load("sound.wav") for _ in range(10)]
index = 0
and then
def play():
sounds[index].play()
index = (index + 1) % len(sounds)
The more sounds you load, the more instances you can have playing at the same time (in this example 10).
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 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.