CODEWITHSUNDEEP
iphoneioscocos2d-iphonesoundeffectsimpleaudioengine
Arbel
Arbel

Reputation: 435

Cocos Denshion: Play sound effect in sync with music

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...

Upvotes: 6

Views: 2974

Answers (3)

Danra
Danra

Reputation: 9906

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:

  1. The main thread is too busy - Try to offload work from it to other threads.

  2. 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.

Upvotes: 0

Oriol Nieto
Oriol Nieto

Reputation: 5619

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.

Upvotes: 0

Wasif Saood
Wasif Saood

Reputation: 2008

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"];

Upvotes: 1

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