How to stop sound in pygame?

Question

Ok so basically I'm working on this pygame game and I'm using the mixer sub module for sounds. However, in pygame if you want to stop a sound, the sound must finish its cycle until it can be stopped. For all my sounds this is ok as they can be a looped 1 second sound. However, I use a falling sound which needs to constantly play in a cycle, but cycling a falling sound that is only 1 second long doesn't sound very effective. So, ultimately I want to know if there is a way to stop a 7 second sound loop instantly without it finishing a cycle.

Answer 1

According to the pygame documentation for pygame.mixer

pygame.mixer.pause()

will temporarily stop playback of all sound channels. You can start them all playing again with;

pygame.mixer.unpause()

For an individual sound, whilst it will stop after a full cycle, you can immediately affect it's volume with;

pygame.mixer.Sound.set_volume(0)

So what I'd try first is stopping the sound at the same time as setting it's volume to zero and seeing if that solves your problem. Alternatively, you can split your mixer into Channels for better controlling sound playback, which will give you the ability to use

pygame.mixer.Channel.pause()
pygame.mixer.Channel.unpause()

On specific groups of sounds rather than all sound. You create a mixer channel with;

pygame.mixer.Channel(id)

You can then play specific sounds on that channel with;

pygame.mixer.Channel.play(Sound, loops=0, maxtime=0, fade_ms=0)

This would also allow you to more dynamically adjust the levels of various types of sounds in your game - for example, environment, music, weather, voices and how they overlap each other, just keep in mind a channel can only play one sound at a time. Because of this, it may by prudent to use;

free_channel = pygame.mixer.find_channel()
free_channel.play(Sound)

or more simply;

pygame.mixer.find_channel().play(Sound)

For everything except your 'falling' channel.