[Solved] Sound Playback Delay?

FMOD Studio
1

Hello!

After a few false starts, I’ve got FMOD Studio working with my current project, and I must say the DAW interface is fun to work with; plus, being able to tinker while the game is running is pretty great. Unfortunately, though, I seem to be doing something wrong in my implementation - every sound takes around a quarter second to actually play. For example, when the player collects a key, the “Get Key” sound effect starts playing noticeably late.

The following is my simple “Play Sound” function, which allows the programmer to pass in a string such as “event:/key” to choose what event to trigger.

void AudioSys::PlaySound(std::string soundToPlay, float volume)
  {
    if (IsAudioOn)
    {
      const char * sound = soundToPlay.c_str();

      FMOD::Studio::ID eventID = {0};
      ERRCHECK( fmodSystem->lookupID(sound, &eventID) );

      if (LastSoundPlayed == &eventID)
        if (soundRepeatDelay != 0.0f)
          return;

      // One-shot event
      LastSoundPlayed = &eventID;
       

      FMOD::Studio::EventDescription* eventDescription = NULL;
      ERRCHECK( fmodSystem->getEvent(&eventID, FMOD_STUDIO_LOAD_BEGIN_NOW, &eventDescription) );

      FMOD::Studio::EventInstance* eventInstance = NULL;
      ERRCHECK( eventDescription->createInstance(&eventInstance) );
      eventInstance->setVolume(volume);
      ERRCHECK( eventInstance->start() );
      
      soundRepeatDelay = SOUND_REPEAT_DELAY;

      // Release will clean up the instance when it completes
      ERRCHECK( eventInstance->release() ); 
    }
  }

I’m not sure what I could be doing wrong, as I don’t know Studio well enough to spot the problem, but I greatly appreciate any help you guys can offer!

2

It sounds like your sample data may be taking a while to load. The sample data for an event starts loading asynchronously when you call EventDescription::createInstance(), so if you call EventInstance::start() immediately, playback may be delayed until the sample data is loaded.

To play audio without a delay, you need to wait until the sample data is loaded before calling EventInstance::start(). You can do this in one of two ways:
[list]
[]Wait until the sample data is loaded for that specific event by polling EventInstance::getLoadingState() until it returns FMOD_STUDIO_LOADING_STATE_LOADED[/:m:ptx21uox]
[]Load sample data for all events in the bank by calling Bank::loadSampleData() and poll Bank::getSampleLoadingState() until it returns FMOD_STUDIO_LOADING_STATE_LOADED[/:m:ptx21uox][/list:u:ptx21uox]

3

Thank you so much for the tip!

I tried implementing it as:

// Load sounds?
    ERRCHECK( fmodSystem->loadBankFile(Common_MediaPath("Master Bank.bank"), FMOD_STUDIO_LOAD_BANK_NORMAL, &masterBank) );

    ERRCHECK( fmodSystem->loadBankFile(Common_MediaPath("Master Bank.bank.strings"), FMOD_STUDIO_LOAD_BANK_NORMAL, &stringsBank) );

    ERRCHECK( fmodSystem->lookupID("event:/titleMusic", &bgm_title_ID) ); 

    ERRCHECK( fmodSystem->getEvent(&bgm_title_ID, FMOD_STUDIO_LOAD_BEGIN_NOW, &bgm_title_Desc) );

    ERRCHECK( bgm_title_Desc->createInstance(&bgm_title_Inst) );

    ERRCHECK( masterBank->loadSampleData() );
    
    FMOD_STUDIO_LOADING_STATE checkState;

    do
    {
      masterBank->getSampleLoadingState(&checkState);
    }
    while(checkState != FMOD_STUDIO_LOADING_STATE_LOADED);

However, it seems to hang the program - indefinitely. Even with a small set of sounds that shouldn’t take long to load, the while loop doesn’t seem to end. Am I missing something crucial again? Thanks for your help in advance!

4

That looks almost right, but you need to call System::update() inside your do-while loop. I didn’t think to specify this before - sorry about that!

5

Worked beautifully - thank you!