Which audio playback technology do I need for this?

Question

I have trouble choosing the right audio playback technology. There's a ton of technologies to use on the iPhone, it's so confusing.

What I need to do is this:

• start playing short sounds ranging between 0.1 and 2 seconds

• high quality playback, no crackle (I heard some of the iPhone audio playback technologies do a crackle sound on start or end, which is bad!)

• ability to start playback of a sound, while there's already another one playing right now (two, three or more sounds at the same time)

What would you suggest here, and why? Thanks :-)

Answer 1

There are basically four options for playing audio on the iPhone:

1. Audio Toolbox. Easy, but only good for playing sound effects in applications (sample code).

2. Audio Queue Services. Very powerful, can do anything. C API, pretty messy to work with. Callbacks, buckets, pain.

3. AVAudioPlayer. About the easiest option. Can play compressed audio, with a simple wrapper you can easily play multiple instances of the same sample at once (non-compressed audio only, as there is only one HW audio decoder). Starting to play a sound with AVAudioPlayer seems to lag about 20 ms, could be a problem.

4. OpenAL. Decent compromise between complexity and features. Sounds do not lag, you can play multiple sounds just fine, but you have to do a lot of the work yourself. I’ve written a sound engine called Finch that can help you.

Don’t know much about cracking, never experienced it. I think there were some issues with playing seamless compressed loops with AVAudioPlayer, can be overcome by saving the loop without compression.