Playing sounds in iPhone games - slowdowns

Question

I'm using the AVAudioPlayer to play sound FX on a separate thread in my app. Right now my app is fairly simple, I have a UIScrollView for a scrolling background, and a couple of CALayers that represent a player and an enemy in a simple side-scroller type game (think Mario or Kung Fu or whatnot)...I can move the player left and right, with the view scrolling appropriately with no problems. I have an "attack" button that's playing a sound effect...and many times when I play the sound effect, I get a little bit of a hitch, graphically. Is this just par for the course on the iPhone using Quartz? Is there some way to have this perform a little more smoothly without starting to investigate OpenGL?

Answer 1

Use NSData dataWithContentsOfMappedFile instead of dataWithContentsOfFile.

Also AVAudioPlayer handles it's own threading, you don't need to create one. [AVAudioPlayer play] returns after it started playing, not after it is done playing.

And don't forget to release your AVAudioPlayer when you no longer need it, for example if you only want to play a sound onces, implemement the audioPlayerDidFinishPlaying:successfully: delegate and release it in there.

Answer 2

How are you playing the sound? If I was to make a guess it would be that each time the sound is played the OS is actually loading it from disk as well as playing it.

Update:

Ok, you really don't need to be creating a new thread to play a sound. This alone could cause a stutter in a game and is also redundant - The AVAudioPlayer play method is asynchronous - it returns immediately and not when the sound ends.