Ah I see. I feel dumb for not knowing about all these samples. Got it building and running on the device. Seem super quick so Ill take a look at how it implements sound in depth. Thanks!

@Arbel - it doesn't have a project file you just change the target in XCode like any other demo that ships with cocos2d.

So I tested it by not playing the sounds on touches, but when the notes were supposed to be hit. Same lag issue..so maybe its not completely about touches...However, when I ran it on the simulator for the first time, most of the lag was gone! Im not sure really what this means tho...

@Steve Thanks, however I couldn't find the sample project file, just the source plus sounds. Last time I had those and could get it to compile but nothing was playing. Will give it a shot again!

@JC Im not doing it quite like how Guitar Hero does it, similar to Reflect Beat or Cytus if you've played? The sound will be played when the user touches, so they can hear if they are getting "off-beat". I know this is possible at least on the iPad, as Reflect Beat (A konami music game for iPad/Arcade) used note sounds, and they are perfectly on time. I appreciate the advice though :) Did you make a music game?

do you want to do something similar to guitar hero ?

if yes, for me, you don't have to play sound when user do input, you play sound when it 'must' be played and "tweek" it depending on user touch.

ex :

in your "music", you have to play the sound "XXX" at 1.0 sec:
- you play it at 1.0 and keep is handle
-> if you get no input from user during X ms, cut/fadeout the sound
-> if you get wrong input from user, modulate sound frequency
-> is you get good input from user, do nothing

it's only a short sample, on how I probably do something similar to guitar hero. you will probably need some other tricks like reminding the user do nothing on previous sound so play next sound with volume off and fade in if inputs coming...

anyway, i think there is no way to have no latency between touch input and sound playing in music games.

The DrumPad demo ships with cocos2d, it includes all the sound files.

Havent looked at this for a while but attempted to download the DrumPad demo and get it working. Does anyone have a link to the project file? The demo I found only had source files and I tried to make the project but when I got it running I was getting no sounds.

As for the lag issues, Ive been experimenting by removing all of my touchMove code, changing the file to mono, and enabling the flag for fast event in cc config. Nothing seems to change.

Anyone have any additional advice on where I could look?

This trick did not help for me. The interstitial ad takes over the sound and when the ad is closed and control is back in my app then the sound is still dead.
The only help is to replace the scene in CCDirector - then the sound is back.
I'm on latest Cocos2d 1.x and iOS4. Any help please?

Edit: oops, my bad. I had to resume the background music and all was fine. Thanks anyway!!!

--Josef

I have run into the same issue now, thanks steve for pointing me to the solution, the magic line of code is:

[[CDAudioManager sharedManager] setResignBehavior:kAMRBStopPlay autoHandle:YES];

Personally I'd argue for this being the default for kAMM_FxPlusMusicIfNoOtherAudio in todays multitasking ios environment...

Are you sure you are processing all the touches? You can look at the CocosDenshion DrumPad demo for an example of touch handling. You can also use that to experiment with the latencies by trying to play along with the loop or replace the loop with one of your songs.

Thanks for the reply. There doesn't appear to be any gap even with 4-5 in a row, so maybe its not the sound playing thats the issue. If it is in the touch processing I wonder what I can do to solve that issue. I actually moved it to the first line of my ccTouchesBegan, before determining if a note was hit, but still the same delay.

I played an iPad music game recently, Reflect Beat, and it has something similar to what I want to achieve. No delay between sounds and button presses. Perhaps Im just doing something stupid.

What makes you think it is the sound that is lagging? OpenAL (as used by playEffect) is very low latency. Try playing two sounds in a row e.g.

[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] playEffect:@"Assist.wav"];
[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] playEffect:@"Assist.wav"];

Can you hear any gap? I had one user who wondered why the volume of his sounds were so loud - it was because he inadvertently was playing simultaneous copies of each sound. It wasn't until he was playing 11 copies of the sound that I heard a phasing effect which twigged me to the fact that multiple sounds may be playing.

If there is lag my guess is it is in processing the touches.

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 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 (a few hundred milliseconds). 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?

It seems to only throw the messages in the log on the iOS 5 simulator. Did anyone ever open an issue with Apple on this one?

@varedis - Thanks a lot..

@vishalavalani - As far as I am aware and from what I have used in my apps, you do not need to set up an AutoreleasePool, I have always just used the preload function as is and have never run in to any problems.

[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] preloadEffect:mySoundEffect.aiff];

@shaneT - That has nothing to do with preloading sounds or leaks.

Here are some other people that do have issues though.

http://www.cocos2d-iphone.org/forum/topic/21909

Do you use NSAutoreleasePool also along with the preloadEffect code? what exactly is the use of it?

I have never had a memory leak issue from preloading sounds

I read about preloading sounds in SimpleAudioEngine through
[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] preloadEffect:@"bell.wav"];
But, with this there are memory leaks which I read on couple of sites. On some websites it was used like this: -
-(void)loadSoundFilesInBackground
{
NSAutoreleasePool *pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

[[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] preloadEffect:@"bell.wav"];

[pool release];
}

What is the best way to load sound files in background through SimpleAudioEngine ? What is the use of NSAutoreleasePool here?

Thanks guys :)

However there's a problem with multi-tasking. If someone runs my app, doesn't like the music so presses the home key and finds their iPod music then runs it again my app will shutdown their iPod music. AVAudioSessionCategorySoloAmbient is still set.

Did you have a resign handler set up as is illustrated in the FadeToGrey example? You should see that example handles this use case.

Hi,

Not sure if this is the best way to do it but I came up with my own solution.

I set the default settings in CDAudioManager to be

_audioSessionCategory = AVAudioSessionCategoryAmbient;
				willPlayBackgroundMusic = YES;

regardless of whether there's other music playing.

Note that normally when you choose AVAudioSessionCategoryAmbient the willPlayBackgroundMusic variable is set to NO. That's so that two songs aren't playing over the top of each other. So to avoid that I do a test for whether isOtherAudioPlaying whenever I want to play background music. Either after my app enters the background or on startup etc.

So in my app delegate I've added the following

- (void)applicationWillResignActive:(UIApplication *)application {
    [[CCDirector sharedDirector] pause];
    [[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] stopBackgroundMusic];
}

-(void) applicationWillEnterForeground:(UIApplication*)application {
	[[CCDirector sharedDirector] startAnimation];
    [[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] playBackgroundMusic:@"MyMusic.caf"];//play background music

    if (([[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] objectForKey:@"Sound"] boolValue] == NO) || ([[CDAudioManager sharedManager] isOtherAudioPlaying])) {
        [[SimpleAudioEngine sharedEngine] stopBackgroundMusic];
    }
}

I've got a button that turns sound on or off which sets my NSUserDefaults Sound Object. So anywhere I test if sound is on I also have to add the [[CDAudioManager sharedManager] isOtherAudioPlaying] test.

Might not be the most elegant solution but it works.

Hi @clarus or anyone who can help.

I've got a similar problem. I'm trying to let people use their iPod music if it's already playing.

The option kAMM_FxPlusMusicIfNoOtherAudio works great if they are playing music before they ever play the game.

However there's a problem with multi-tasking. If someone runs my app, doesn't like the music so presses the home key and finds their iPod music then runs it again my app will shutdown their iPod music. AVAudioSessionCategorySoloAmbient is still set.

I've tried running the CDAudioManager configure in

- (void)applicationDidBecomeActive:(UIApplication *)application {
    [CDAudioManager configure: kAMM_FxPlusMusicIfNoOtherAudio];
	[[CCDirector sharedDirector] resume];
}

I've also tried

[[CDAudioManager sharedManager] setMode: kAMM_FxPlusMusicIfNoOtherAudio];

and

[CDAudioManager initAsynchronously: kAMM_FxPlusMusicIfNoOtherAudio];

But nothing seems to have the desired effect of switching from AVAudioSessionCategorySoloAmbient to AVAudioSessionCategoryAmbient (ie. letting iPod music play after an app becomes active again.

Any ideas on how this can be done? I've searched through the forums and no one seems to be mentioning it, but it seems a pretty big flaw for anyone who want to give people the option of playing their own music.

Thanks,
Travis

That warning is based on a recommendation from Apple at an audio presentation from one of the WWDCs (2009 off the top of my head).

The default mixer rate is 44.1KhZ so if you only use 44.1KhZ samples you won't get the warning. Apples recommendation for performance was to have all your samples and the mixer sample rate set at the same value. However, current devices are performance beasts compared to the old 1st gen devices. I agree with Birkemose, you are unlikely to see any performance difference on current devices and memory use is more of a concern.

You get the warning, because the sample rate of one or more of your files, doesn't match the sample rate settings.
I dont think it affects the performance much, but if you ex have sample rate set to 11KB, and load a 44KB audio clip, you will waste a lot of memory.

I keep getting these warnings:

Denshion::CDSoundEngine - WARNING sample rate does not match mixer sample rate performance will not be optimal.

Does this in any way affects my performance? Also, how can I fix this?

@steve No, I am using the old version of cocosDenhion on iOS 5 where I noticed this problem. Anyways was able to solve the problem. Thanks for the help :)

Yes, you can do that. There was lots of discussion in the past about video interrupting audio and that was the solution but you shouldn't need to do that with the latest version of CocosDenshion. You must be using an old version of iOS too, now video shares the audio session with audio so there is no interruption.

@steve, Yes I am using 0.99.4.

I was able to resolve this issue by explicitly calling [[CDAudioManager sharedManager] audioSessionResumed], as I noticed that the video was interrupting the audio session bt wasn't resuming it. Is it ok to do so?

-Ankur

Are you using an old version of cocos2d?