AS3: SoundManager v1.4

[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Matt Przybylski and Paul Johnson. Paul Johnson said: AS3: SoundManager v1.4 http://icio.us/EoDcsp [...]

I use your class in my project and i can't understand, why my sounds play only once when i try to Listen an MouseEvent.CLICK or MouseEvent.MOUSE_OVER the sound is play one time and when the Event happen and then the sound dosn't play again...???

@Vadim: If you're trying to play the same sound multiple times at the same time (or quickly pressing the button to re-use the same sound and re-play over the other sound) you can't currently do that. There were some limitations I had to impose on playback and that was one of them. You have to create a new sound item if for each sound (even if it is the same one) that you want to play at the same time. They should, however, play one after the other as long as the first play call has finished, you can re-use the same sound item to play that sound again. If it doesn't work for you, please send me an isolated example and I can take a look at it. Thanks.

Ok, Matt i'll try your recommendation, i need to play the same sound multiple times in the game.

Tnks a lot and Happy New Year, your Class is super!!!

@Vadim: That shouldn't be a problem, you should be able to play the same sound multiple times over, just can't play it multiple times at the same time unless you create multiple instances of it. You could use something like an object pool to track this and pick one out of the pool when you need to play it. Hope that helps.

hi, great class! thanks!!

i too am finding that once i play a sound i cant replay it at a later time - trying to find a solution...

this line works the first time but thereafter no sound is played:

SoundManager.getInstance().playSound("squeak");

note: i can play sounds repeatedly when i comment out the following line in the SoundItem class in the 'play' method:

//if (!paused) return;

@brendan: Good catch, very sorry about that guys, I forgot to clear the paused property in the complete of the sound. Go ahead and re-download the class, it now works as it should. Thanks for the heads up.

Please, everyone, keep on testing this and finding bugs, this is why I wanted to put it out there so it can be tested by other devs

Hi, thanks for sharing your code!
I also need to play a sound multiple at the same time (button mouse over). Therefore i added a function playSoundDirect() that simply calls play() on the soundItem.sound object.
In this case (button mouseover) i do not need a soundchannel reference or a sound_complete event. Calling sound.play() direct serves the purpose.

improvement suggestion:
To avoid errors when a sound is not registerd or already removed, the SoundManager functions playSound(), pauseSound() ... should check first that the _soundsDict contains the requested SoundItem.

@Björn: If you've made additions/fixes to the code, it'd be greatly appreciated if you could send me the updated files with a quick quote/comments on where/what you changed. You could send it to matt [at] reintroducing dot com. Thanks!

"Fixed bug where if muteAllSounds() was called, playing a sound after that caused it to play rather than stay muted". Doesn't appear to work. In the SoundItem class I added "if (muted) volume = 0;" to the play method and that seems to have fixed it.

Possible issue...SoundItem is version 1.2, but the release is version 1.4. Maybe an old build? Thanks!

Another suggested fix...in some versions of the Flash player, the position of looping sounds can be erroneously reported, leading to a null channel being returned.

In the SoundItem class, in the play() method, right before calling sound.play() insert this line:

position = position%sound.length;

This will limit the position to the length of the sound. Cheers!

@Rob: Thanks, I'll take a look at this stuff, just got back from hiatus

@Rob @Matt. Yup. seemed old. Its 1.2. However, if SoundManager is 1.4, all I did to fix this mute issue for me was added this line into 's function right after .

if (muted) return;

Apparently, you already had a public var but was not used in this class.

Thanks for this great library btw. Its Awesome.

Tahir - I think you're better of doing as I suggested ( if (muted) volume = 0 ) otherwise your sound will not be silently playing in the background (and hence not be muted). Depends on your needs, I suppose.

@Rob nah if I set to the sound still plays. Anyway. I think I'll stick to the old line I put.

I have a little-big problem with the library SoundManager. when you run the PlaySound method, uses the play method of the library flash.media.Sound. According to the documentation, this method should return a channel, but may also return a Null ( http://livedocs.adobe.com/flash/9.0/ActionScriptLangRefV3/flash/media/Sound.html#play() )
Has not seen this option, and I get many times.

hey Matt!!
why you don't upload this project to your github account??? it would be nice!!
i already made a copy at https://github.com/GrupoW/as3-Sound-Manager, but should be forked from your original repo XD

cheers!.

@Raul: I have not yet jumped on the Git bandwagon but have considered it I see you added an addMultipleSounds method. Is that all you added or were there other additions? That's a good idea, by the way, I'll have to add that in!

well another addition that i made was to hide the getDefinitionByName call by creating a public method addSound that look like this:

public function addSound($linkageID:String):Boolean {
return registerSound(getDefinitionByName($linkageID), null, "", $linkageID);
}

this method also apply the linkageID as the same as the SoundID, because i notice that i always ended up putting SoundManager.addLibrarySound("clickSound", "clickSound");

another one is that if you try to do something with a sound that it is not added (for example, play or fade) the SoundManager warning me with the next message

Error: The string identifier [SD_OPEN] of the sound to fade is not added
at com.reintroducing.sound::SoundManager/fadeSound()
at sounds_fla::MainTimeline/frame1()

the cool thing is that my application still runs and it is not crashed by referring a null object.

[...] скористатися вже готовими класами, такими як SoundManager. Але особисто мені не дуже подобається ідея [...]

Hi Matt,

i was looking for a good sound manager in as3, and suddenly found you website via google .

this is such a nice library and also i wanted to add some more function's like getting the status of given sound and to check if is currently playing or not.
but it seems i am missing something here.

i just wanted to add a function to know if a particular sound is currently playing or not.

here is the snippet of code, please let me know what i am missing here.

/**
* @author Manoj Sahu
* @param $name name of sound class.
* @return returns true if sound is playing.
*/
public function isSoundPlaying($name:String):Boolean {
if (this._soundsDict[$name].channel.position < this._soundsDict[$name].sound.length) {
return true;
}
return false;
}


@Manoj: You can use the isSoundPaused($name) method to check if it is playing or not

it looks like i was using older version of SoundManager, that why i was wondering that why there is no such method to check if sound is playing.

thanks for making this sound manager event based ( i am huge fan of event driven programming).

[...] Management – Sound Manager v1.4 – Download I recently discovered Sound Manager and so far it has helped me out a great deal. There’s [...]

Hello. It would be nice to have an explicit licence to go with the code. I'd suggest the MIT licence, but that's only because it is so liberal.

Thanks.

@Jos: The code is licensed under the "do whatever the hell you want with it" license I don't believe in putting licenses on open source code; isn't that the meaning of "open source"?

When you use the pauseAllSounds function and you call playAllSounds with useCurrentlyPlayingOnly=true, you should set the values of loop and position to the last ones.

re: Matt/Licences

Well, yes, sort of. However the way copyright and these things work is that, unless you do make it clear that you are releasing it under an explicit license, it is still considered to be yours expressly. By adding a license you make people who want to use the code in commercial projects understand clearly if they can or can not.

You are, of course, under no obligation to licence it in anyway at all! I'm just suggesting that for some people, having an explicit licence (for the lawyers) will make using and adopting your work easier and safer.

here is an open licence from Creative Commons that you could use:

http://bit.ly/l5oUon

they have great licences, but, as mentioned before, the MIT & BSD ones are also extremely open.

Regardless, thanks for this!
Jos

This library is very handy, thanks for sharing your code, however i found that if you use it for playing music and sounds you cannot mute only the music or mute only the sounds unless you kinnda add them to a different dictionary and code different methods, unless there is something i'm missing.

Regardless, thanks !

awesome!!! thanks for sharing your code

Thanks for this awesome piece of code! Great job!

I've been using it in a couple of my projects and recently a client pointed out this bug:
In win 7 when you unplug your headphone the sound.play(..) will return null.

Apparently this is a known issue and is fixed with something like this:

var sound:Sound = new Sound();
var channel:SoundChannel = sound.play(0, loops);
if (!channel) return null; ß add some sort of check

channel.

I tried to fix it, but I'm on a mac and don't have access to a win7 computer which makes bugtesting really hard. Maybe you can do an update?
thanks!

@Martijn: Unfortunately I too am on OSX and don't have access to a Win7 machine. Can anyone confirm/deny/help with this bug?

I made some changes to make working with embedded sounds alot easier. ie:

[Embed("Click.mp3")]
public static var Click:Class;

I made it so $name can now be a class or a string, if it's a class, we can use it's qualifiedClassName as the name. This way I can just use the class itself as the name.

manager.addSound(Audio.CLICK, Audio.CLICK);

This also opened the door to another nice trick, I don't even need to call addSound, since playSound can now accept a class, I can just have SoundManager call addSound() internally if that class hasn't been added before.

So, loading and playing a new sound, is as simple as a one liner:
manager.playSound(Audio.CLICK);

This is sweet cause it keeps overhead to minimum. No constants to define, and maintain, no big bootstrap function where you addSound() everything, no string literals to remember. Just one static class file with all your embeds.

Lemme know if you're interested, it was a very minor change, not sure what edge cases this might expose though...

@Shawn: Please do send me a copy of your changes. If you could detail in the email what lines you changed/added (estimate at least) that'd be great so I can take a look. I've got multiple versions of this thing saved now with experimental features and am getting a bit lost in all of it so I need to keep track of changes as best as possible at this point You can email matt at reintroducing. Thanks!

Hey Shawn and Matt - did you guys make any progress with implementing Shawn's updates to the SoundManager class? I would be very interested in using those shortcuts and embedding the sounds at runtime.

I'm having some problems referencing library sounds from an exported SWC - the soundmanager class cant find them when I do:

manageSound.addLibrarySound(getDefinitionByName("soundLibraryNameinSWC"), "soundName");

Cheers,
Ben

@Benje: Unfortunately I have not had a chance to do this yet. My wife is 8+ months pregnant so I've not had a chance to do anything, really It will probably still be a while before I get to it, sorry :\

Hi Matt,

Your SoundManager class has been a great help to us. One thing I noticed while doing some memory profiling is that the removeSound method does not properly remove the sound from memory. This is caused by the following line:

delete (_soundsDict[$name] as SoundItem);

Instead, the line needs to be change to:

delete _soundsDict[$name]

The reason it is not being GC'd is because (_soundsDict[$name] as SoundItem) is evaluated to a SoundItem object reference. So you are effectively saying delete [Object SoundItem] which has no effect. I've made this change in my version of your class and verified that the sound does indeed get GC'd now.

@Ryan: Thanks, glad the SM has helped. Thanks for the profiling catch as well, I never really stress tested this class as I honestly never did that much sound in my projects so it's always good when it gets put to the test. I haven't been doing much Flash lately (yep, that JS thing...) but I'll add this into the next release whenever that will be Thanks again.

When I call SoundManager.getInstance().muteAllSounds() it only seems to mute everything that's currently playing. If I play anything in the future, it'll ignore the fact that I have recently called mute on everything. Any reason for this?

Otherwise great sound manager!

@SM2: Good catch. I went through a couple of iterations of the SoundItem class and I think somewhere along the line that got lost in the shuffle. A check in the play method for muted should fix it if you'd like to add it in for now. Again, I'll have to update that in a future version but for the time being unfortunately my AS3 work is not a priority :\

Yeah right now I am messing around with the playSound function to see if there is some way to leverage "if (!_areAllMuted)" to play the sounds -- the problem is that simply throwing things into that if-statement meant if I play a new song while mute is active, it won't be playing when I unmute.

I'll add another comment here later if I figure it out -- thanks for the speedy reply!

Also ran into this crazy bug (more of a TweenLite implementation issue) but I had a few objects that were seemingly unrelated to the SoundManager not getting GC'd. Turns out that TweenLite instances have a nextNode property that points to the next Tween instance that was created (probably a linked list type of implementation for performance reasons). The SoundItem objects that are created by SoundManager have a tween instance that they keep around when you call fadeSound. If that sound is never destroyed (which it might not be if you want to keep the sound around to play every so often), then the next TweenLite.to call you make anywhere in your code will be referenced by that SoundItems tween object, keeping it in memory (and since that Tween will reference one of your objects to tween, that object will never be GC'd). My fix was to simply null out the tween reference in SoundItem when the fade was complete and create a new Tween instance each time fadeSound is called. Not ideal but it is better than getting stuck with a larger object in memory.

I believe this is the fix to the playSound issue:

http://pastebin.com/JAFQZtVG

What it will do is play the sound as normal, but then check if everything is muted after dispatching the sounditem play event. If _allAreMuted is true, then it'll mute the item, save the intended volume as denoted in the passed parameter, and then set the volume of the sound to 0 immediately.