I am sure there is a way to do this, and I don't know how, and am new to sound in Cocos2d. I am using SimpleAudioEngine.h as directed to in Ray Wenderlich's wonderful tutorial (Part 1). The problem is, there is a delay when it plays a sound. I KNOW for a fact that there is a way to get rid of the delay, because, just look at all the games that are already out for iPhone!! Note that I am doing this on the Simulator, not on a real device, if that makes a difference. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!!
Have you tried preloadEffect? preload audio effects at initialize before calling playEffect:.
[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] preloadEffect:#"pew-pew-lei.caf"];
This fix might not work. If the sound engine is not initialized properly, it will never preload properly.
Another possibility of sound stuttering: your code might be asking for multiple resource files at the same time, and if you are not multi-threading, it can affect the sound effects.
To test for this: comment out your code when the sound effects play. If the sound effects do not stutter with your code commented out, that means your code is 'keeping the device or thread busy'.
I found this issue when I played an explosion animation. When I commented out the animation code, the sound effect did not stutter the game play.
Related
I am making a music game and when the user presses a note it will produce a sound. The sound naturally needs to play immediately when the user presses, so they can tell whether they are in time with the music. However, it feels as if the sound is lagging, especially when note presses become quicker.
My background .m4a music file is played with AVAudioPlayer. I chose to use this over Cocos Denshion as I have access to the currentTime property. I may be wrong, but I dont think I can access this with CocosDenshion.
I made a .wav file which is extremely short (less than a second). I preload my sound effect on init:
[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] preloadEffect:#"Assist.wav"];
Then to play the sound effect, in CCTouchesBegan I call:
[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] playEffect:#"Assist.wav"];
After that it calls my code to determine the users timing and awards points. Any idea why it might be lagging, or a better way to play sound effects in time with music?
EDIT: Ive tried a few things recently with no results. First I tried playing the sounds automatically as they came up to the appropriate time in the song. Still had the lag, so I dont think it is touch events being slow. I also tried 3 different sound libraries.
However, when I ran in the simulator, it seemed to not be laggy. Does anyone have an idea? Im clueless and its a major feature I cant really take out...
you should avoid this code:- [[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] preloadEffect:#"Assist.wav"];
with the start of app you should load your framework SimpleAudioEngine by writing this code :-
//SimpleAudioEngine *palySound; made object in .h file.
palySound=[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine];
and whenever you want to play sound you can write: [palySound playEffect:#"Assist.wav"];
I am not sure what you're doing in your SoundEngine, but in my own experience, the best way to not get lag to play a sound is to assign an AVAudioPlayer for each sound file (unless you want to start messing around with AudioQueues).
Here it is an example:
Let's assume that you have an AVAudioPlayer *assistPlayer; in your current view controller.
In your viewDidLoad initialize it with your sound:
NSURL *wavURL = [[NSBundle mainBundle] URLForResource:#"Assist" withExtension:#"wav"];
assistPlayer = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:wavURL error:nil];
Then, in your IBAction where you want to play the file, just do:
[assistPlayer play];
You shouldn't get any lag.
Did you try Finch? It claims to play sounds with low latency, and it is also just a wrapper around OpenAL.
Other than that, I'm really not experienced with OpenAL, but can think of two possible reasons for your lag:
The main thread is too busy - Try to offload work from it to other
threads.
Perhaps OpenAL is defined with too large of a buffer, so the pipeline loads the entire sound into the buffer (or a big chunk of it), and only afterwards the playback starts.
I have a recording that has some unuseful voices at the beginning, and at the end.
How can I play just the middle part of the sound?
I have AL_SEC_OFFSET, that is suitable for the entry point, I already use it, but what about the endpoint?
Is there any smart OpenAL settings for this? Hopeso.
Thanks.
There could be a workaround that fires a timer that stops playing before end.
Any simplier?
OpenAL doesn't have built-in support for stopping playback at a specific sample point. A timer is your best bet in this case, even though it will be somewhat inaccurate.
If you want sample-perfect stopping, you could just load the middle part of the audio file into an ALBuffer rather than the entire thing. I have some code which does that here:
https://github.com/kstenerud/ObjectAL-for-iPhone/blob/master/ObjectAL/ObjectAL/Support/OALAudioFile.m#L188
Can somebody tell me how to scrub the AQPlayer ( used in Apple's SpeakHere example ) using a UISlider like the iPod does?
I know how to handle the slider part, but once I have my value from the slider, what do I need to set/change/update in AQPlayer, or the AudioQueue, so that the player moves to that part of the Queue and continues playing from that point?
Is there any easy way to do this with a percentage of the playing time or do I have to make some calculations with the packets??
Thanks for any input.
Al
For anyone who also needs to seek/scrubb in an audio file, I found a solution to my question at the following link: Audio Queues
Have a look at the function
-(void)seek:(UInt64)packetOffset;
It worked perfectly after some initial fine tuning.
I need to play sounds (~5 seconds each) throughout my iphone application. When they're triggered, they need to play immediately.
For the moment I'm using AudioServices and (as you probably know) the first time you play a sound it lags, then every time there after it's perfect. Is there some code available that's clever enough to preload an AudioServices sound (by playing it silently maybe?). I've read adjusting the system volume programmatically will get your app rejected, so that's not an option. Seems AudioServices isn't made for volume correction from what I can see.
I've looked into OpenAL and while feasible seems a little over kill. AVAudioPlayer seems like a little bit of a better option, I'm using that for background music at present. Extending my music player to handle a 'sound board' might be my last resort.
On the topic of OpenAL, does anyone know of a place with a decent (app store friendly) OpenAL wrapper for the iPhone?
Thanks in advance
Finch could be perfect for you. It’s a tiny wrapper around OpenAL with very low latency and simple API. See also all SO questions tagged ‘Finch’.
If you use an AVAudioPlayer, you can call prepareToPlay when you initialize the object to reduce the delay between calling play and having the audio start.
I have a performance-intensive iPhone game I would like to add sounds to. There seem to be about three main choices: (1) AVAudioPlayer, (2) Audio Queues and (3) OpenAL. I’d hate to write pages of low-level code just to play a sample, so that I would like to use AVAudioPlayer. The problem is that it seems to kill the performace – I’ve done a simple measuring using CFAbsoluteTimeGetCurrent and the play message seems to take somewhere from 9 to 30 ms to finish. That’s quite miserable, considering that 25 ms == 40 fps.
Of course there is the prepareToPlay method that should speed things up. That’s why I wrote a simple class that keeps several AVAudioPlayers at its disposal, prepares them beforehand and then plays the sample using the prepared player. No cigar, still it takes the ~20 ms I mentioned above.
Such performance is unusable for games, so what do you use to play sounds with a decent performance on iPhone? Am I doing something wrong with the AVAudioPlayer? Do you play sounds with Audio Queues? (I’ve written something akin to AVAudioPlayer before 2.2 came out and I would love to spare that experience.) Do you use OpenAL? If yes, is there a simple way to play sounds with OpenAL, or do you have to write pages of code?
Update: Yes, playing sounds with OpenAL is fairly simple.
AVAudioPlayer is very marginal for game audio. Tackling AudioQueue or OpenAL by adapting one of the examples is definitely the way to go. latency is much more controllable that way.
If you're calling play on the main thread, try running it on a separate thread. What I ended up doing is:
#include <dispatch/dispatch.h>
dispatch_queue_t playQueue = dispatch_queue_create("com.example.playqueue", NULL);
AVAudioPlayer* player = ...
dispatch_async(playQueue, ^{
[player play];
});
which fixed the worst of the framerate stuttering I was experiencing.
I use OpenAL and the classes that came with the CrashLanding sample code. It's worked fine so far to play samples and play looped music all at the same time. I'm currently learning how to release the memory I've allocated for a sound (.wav file) when, for example, I want to play some intro music just once.
Use CocosDenshion – it’s free, easy, and works. It wraps AVAudioPlayer for background tracks and OpenAL for sounds.
Do you want to check the buffering with the implementation you're using? It might be somehow related to the 20ms delay you're experiencing. i.e., try to play around with the buffer size.