How to play sounds in Java games?

Question

I'm successfully playing sounds in a Java (1.5) applet game using the following code:

// get an available clip to play it
Clip clip = null;
for (Clip clipTemp : players) {
    if (!clipTemp.isOpen()) {
    clip = clipTemp;
        break;
    }
}
if (clip == null) {
    // no available player found, don't play
    return;
}

clip.open(audioFormat, audioByteData, 0, audioByteData.length);

clip.start();

(Players are a list of clips that I open at the start with the aim to reduce latency, a line listener closes the line when the stop event is retrieved.)

The problem I'm facing is intermittent delays of upto 1 second when playing a sound. This is pretty poor.

Is there any way to improve this? Are SourceDataLines worth considering?

Answer 1

The Java Applet is streaming your clip whenever you want to play it, which is why you are getting a delay as the sound file hasn't been loaded into memory yet.

It's been awhile since I have done Java applet programming, but I do remember that I used to pre-load all my clips and then subsequent calls to play would not re-open the files.

Here is some code from one of my old projects

Clip shoot;

    private loadShootWav()
    {
        AudioInputStream sample;
        sample = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(this.getClass().getResource("shoot.wav"));
        shoot = AudioSystem.getClip();
        shoot.open(sample);
    }

    public void playShootSFX()
    {
        shoot.stop();
        shoot.setFramePosition(0);
        shoot.start(); 
    }