Preload multiple audio files for simultaneous play without..

Scripting Issues
1

Preload multiple audio files for simultaneous play without streaming them.

Hello first.

I’m currently working on a project where we need to load multiple audio files for simultaneous play. But with panda right now the songs are streamed and therefore it’s impossible for us to start all at once.

I tried to find something in the forums but came only across the reason - fmod automatically streams files that exceed a certain size.

So my question is - is there a way to deactivate fmod-streaming and set it to preload the whole files?

If not - is there any other option for us? Using an external sound-engine (free, or cheap).

Thanks for any help…
KK

2

I don’t think there’s currently a way to control it.

Why, does it stutter when you try to stream multiple audio files at the same time?

3

The problem is not exactly that files stutter when they’re being played; we start the preloading of our sound files in a loop, but the samples are not pre-loaded simultaneously, so there’s always an audible delay.

As to our samples’ structure:

Each sample (our game is based on songs) is split up into different channels (between 5 and 7). All channels should start simultaneously, which is not the case at the moment.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

4

If you’re using the default audio manager, then that’s OpenAL, not FMod. Is that what you’re using?

If that’s the case, then I know exactly what’s happening. It attempts to release the sound data (and free it from memory) when the sound is not playing. That’s both good and bad… it lets you open lots of sound handles and it does the memory management very nicely, but it causes the audible delay problem.

It would not be hard to alter the code for the OpenALAudioManager to fix this problem. We would have to add something like a set_caching method to class AudioSound.