Looping audio or continuous sounds question...

#1 In your datablock definitions, add this:

$EffectAudioType = 0;

new AudioDescription(EffectNonLooping)
{
   volume   = 1.0;
   isLooping= false;
   is3D     = false;
   type     = $EffectAudioType;
};

new AudioDescription(EffectLooping)
{
   volume   = 1.0;
   isLooping= true;
   is3D     = false;
   type     = $EffectAudioType;
};

Then define your audio datablocks:

// Explosion sfx
new AudioProfile(explodeAudio)
{
	filename = "~/client/sounds/explode.ogg";
	description = "EffectNonLooping";
	preload = false;
};

// Thrust sfx
new AudioProfile(thrustAudio)
{
	filename = "~/client/sounds/thrust.ogg";
	description = "EffectLooping";
	preload = false;
};

Then just play the sound effects as normal. The explosion sfx will play once, the thrust effect will play until explicitly told to stop (which I guess you're doing in the keyUp event).

As to seamless looping, you'll nead to just tweak the effect in a sound editor. I use Audacity as it's free and quite simple to use.

#2 I noticed a gap between loops when playing streamed ogg files, even with a perfectly edited loop. This happens with the music in Little Gods.

#3 @ philip Thank you. However I am past that part.



@ Jason Yes I get the same issue. I could play a single shot thruster gain and then go into a loop but the gap just sounds horrible.


- Jesse

#4 Maybe you should use an uncompressed format rather than .oggs for your sound effects. I can't imagine that OGG decompression is free or even cheap. And I wouldn't necessarily expect the system to automatically decompress the file into a buffer internally and read from that (which would be a good idea for short files).

#5 Thanks for the tip Smaug.

I found out a few things in my research to crush this problem.

first a good website explaining why

http://www.macromedia.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_15854

then I downloaded another sound and looked at the waveform to verify it was seamless. Made sure it was an uncompressed wav and presto seamless thruster.

- Jesse

#6 If the AudioDescription's isStreaming attribute is set to false, then the whole file gets decompressed into an audio buffer when it is loaded. So, you have a decompression hit when it is loaded, but not when it is played. Ogg files are perfectly fine for sound effects.