I have 3 sounds that I would like to play sequentially in Android. I have created a SoundPool and set the "maxStreams" to "1" thinking that in the for loop the sounds would play "one at a time" not all at once. This, unfortunately, is wrong. How do I play the sounds sequentially and NOT all at once using soundPool. Thanks.
The SoundPool has no queue feature. It will just stop previous sounds when a stream is needed.
If the maximum number of streams is exceeded, SoundPool will
automatically stop a previously playing stream based first on priority
and then by age within that priority.
SoundPool documentation
Related
I'm building an app that plays multiple short sound effects in one activity.
There are over 80 buttons with each buttons that plays a specific sound effect.
I've searched about SoundPool and MediaPlayer and found out SoundPool is more efficient for short sound files.
Here's my question, if I should load over 80 sound effects in one activity, would SoundPool still be the better option? I ask because SoundPool loads the sound at once and reuses it, I think it's a bit heavy to load 80 sounds in one activity (Maybe I'm wrong.) Would like to hear the experts here for a better way or any advice!
Thanks in advance
It does not depend by the number of sounds, but from their size in terms of bytes. Every sound is loaded into memory and if they are too big, you could not have enough memory to load them all.
I would consider using AudioTrack. You instantiate it and when you have to play a sound you can read it from file system or assets or resources and add it to the play queue. It works only with PCM.
How can I play background audio, in Android, without interrupting the MediaPlayer playback, by either using MediaPlayer (preferred) or OpenSL ES?
I know SoundPool is able to play sound effects without interrupting any MediaPlayer playback, but the size is limited to 1M per effect, which is way to less. Not requesting audio focus, via AudioManager doesn't seem to work either, audio doesn't play at all in this case.
And in the case of OpenSL ES, all audio generally stops when I start to play a longer asset file. It's similar to the behaviour of SoundPool described above.
Edit from the comments:
I don't want to interrupt other music players, it's the background
audio of a game, which shall play without interrupting the, for
example, music of a player. Games like Subway Surfer, Clash Royale and
such seem to have this achieved somehow, but I could not achieve it
via OpenSL ES, or MediaPlayer.
In order to play sound in background you can use SoundPool, AudioTracks and OpenSlES.
Soundpool: Use small files and make a sequence. In my last project i use 148 sound files (all small) in different scenarios and played using soundpool. Make a list and play one by one or in parallel. Also in games usually you have a small set of sound for particular scenario and it loops. Best is soundpool for that. You can also perform some effects like rate change. Also ogg files are way small, so use them.
AudioTrack: You can use RAW PCM data in audio track. If you want you can extract pcm data using MediaExtractor from almost all formats and use it. But it will be a little work for you in your case, but it is really good (supports huge data, even live streaming).
OpenSLES: Apparently android uses opensles in background for all its purpose. So using it will help you a lot. But it's not easy to get everything done on it. You need to learn more for lesser work.
I have been deeply working on OpenSlES for about 20 days and still i will say for small purpose use soundpool, medium to high level implementation use AudioTracks and for kickass implementation use OpenSLES.
PS: It will be bad effect on your user if you play game sound in background while they are playing their music or their call. Personal experience.
I've been trying to make multiple sounds work simultaneously but I kept getting errors like Sample not ready and Error creating AudioTrack. Though I've taken care of the first error, the other error persists.
I'm using two mp3 files, that are away above 5 mb(>4 minutes) and thus was wondering if SoundPool is the right way to go about it? I can use Media Manager but it doesn't let me play multiple files simultaneously.
SoundPool is recommended for <1MB sound clips, so I'd use MediaPlayer in your case. You can call the following for each sound and they will play simultaneously:
MediaPlayer.create(YourActivity.this, R.raw.your_sound).start();
Or you can create multiple MediaPlayer objects and play a sound on each, then release() them.
Since my last question hasnt been answered where I used simple medaiplayer (Sound sometimes remains silent when playing more sounds in a row, why?) and tried to create the whole thing using SoundPool. But guess what, almost same thing happens but with an error
AudioFlinger could not create track, status: -12
Error creating AudioTrack
I read about that at most 32 sound can be stored in the memory of soundpool then I will get the error. Thats right, after the 32th sound I cannot play any of the sounds since I always get the error. So how could I use more than 32 sounds with SoundPool? I tried to use 3 Soundpools with 20 sounds in each of them, and I always unload all the sound from the other pools with this:
mSoundPoolMapV1.clear(); //clearing HashMap
for(int i=1;i<15;i++){
mSoundPoolV1.unload(i);
}
But same error comes again. (I use 22k sounds instead of 44.1k, I read this could solve it but nothing happened)
Any suggestions appreciated. What the hell is that I cannot play about 50 sounds neither with mediaplayer and nor with soundpool? How is that possible??
With release() :
mSoundPoolMap.clear();
for(int i=1;i<50;i++){
mSoundPool.unload(i);
}
mSoundPool.release();
mSoundPoolMap.put(1, mSoundPool.load(Main.this, R.raw.sound1, 1));
...
mSoundPoolMap.put(50, mSoundPool.load(Main.this, R.raw.sound50, 1));
SO I clear the hashmp, then unload all the sounds, then I release the soundpool. Then I fill the hashmap again, but now It gives me no sound at all. I must miss something, could you tell me what?
There's a limitation in the AudioMixer that only allows 32 AudioTracks at the same time. The SoundPool will try to create an AudioTrack whenever it starts playback of one of the channels (I guess this corresponds to a sample) belonging to the pool. However, the track is not destroyed until you destroy the SoundPool, so the track name will remain allocated even if it has been stopped.
You could try calling release() on your SoundPool. That should cause the native SoundPool object to be destroyed, thereby destroying all AudioTracks it has created and deallocating their names in the AudioMixer.
Underlying audio hardware is not unlimited. You can only hold so many sounds in memory at a time. When I made a 3D audio library for desktops the limit was variable so I had to query the limit from the hardware before starting or it would lead to seemingly random failures. You should have a single SoundPool and just load and unload sounds into as you need them. Then you need to set up some kind of a priority for the sounds that should be playing so you can make sure that the sounds you really need don't get unloaded to play an optional background noise.
The SoundPool Documentation actually has a really nice description of a typical use-case.
I'm having troubles with the soundpool class. Here it goes:
In my game app (music app btw) I need to reproduce at least 32 short sounds at the same time, so I declare my soundpool like that:
private SoundPool sp;
sp = new SoundPool(128, AudioManager.STREAM_MUSIC, 0);
After that I load all the MP3 sounds needed, about 80 sound of 55KB each. I have no troubles loading all the sounds, but its slow! Well it's no the problem. The real trouble is when I play about 20 sounds at the same time, there's an error in my log:
ERROR/AudioFlinger(59): no more track names available
ERROR/AudioTrack(26349): AudioFlinger could not create track, status: -12
ERROR/SoundPool(26349): Error creating AudioTrack
After that every sound that i try to play throws the same error, and no sound can be played. Not even sounds of another Activity / soundpool. I have no clue of what's going or how to fix it! Should I change the format of the sound files? Should I free memory or something after playing a sound?
(I'm testing on a Samsung Galaxy S I9000, 2.3.3 OS system. The app is 2.1)
see this (in android group)
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),
A couple of thoughts here. One: the first parameter to the SoundPool constructor is not the number of sounds you want to load into it, it's the maximum number of simultaneous streams that you'll be playing. Second, SoundPool has limited memory for sounds, about 1MB. So I wouldn't be at all surprised if you hit some undocumented limit to the number of tracks you can load in at one time. Notice that 80 sounds times 55k per sound is definitely over 1MB. And that limit is for after the mp3s have been uncompressed into audio data inside SoundPool.