SharkSound

v0.1 - Copyright Sharkable Inc.

SharkSound is for loading and playing sounds in native code. It has a focus on mobile. It is cross platform with a C++ API. It supports iOS, OS X, and Android. It wraps OpenAL on Apple platforms and OpenSL ES on Android.

It supports WAV and MP3 on all platforms, as well as whatever sound formats those platforms can load.

Send questions and comments to jgs@sharkable.com Thanks!

Building

Include the files in the sharksound directory in your project, as well as the appropriate platform subdirectory. Put the src directory into your header search path.

For the Android NDK, make sure to support STL and OpenSL ES. Here's a hint at what you might want in your .mk build files:

APP_STL := gnustl_static
LOCAL_LDLIBS := -lOpenSLES -landroid

Using

It's simple! You construct a SharkSound::SoundController appropriate to your platform. If you don't hate preprocessor macros, you might do it like this:

SharkSound::SoundController *sound_controller = NULL;
#if __APPLE__
  sound_controller = new AppleSoundController();
#elif __ANDROID__
  // Pass in the Activity's AssetManager (activity.getAssets()) to the native code as
  // asset_manager_java.
  AAssetManager *asset_manager = AAssetManager_fromJava(env, asset_manager_java);  
  sound_controller = new AndroidSoundController(asset_manager);
#else
  #define NO_SOUND_SUPPORT
#endif

Now your cross-platform code can load and play sounds!

SharkSound::Sound *my_sound = sound_controller->GetSound("sounds/foo.wav");
my_sound->Play();

See sound.h and sound_controller.h for the full interface.

Note on iOS

Xcode by default flattens the directory structure of your assets. Because of this, if you try to load "sounds/foo.wav" on iOS, SharkSound will first try to load the full path, then try to just load "foo.wav". This way you can have a directory structure in Android and not worry about that breaking iOS.

Memory Management

It's recommended you use one SoundController for the whole run of your app. After you are done with a sound in a certain context, call sound->Free(). Calling GetSound on the same file before freeing an instance will return the SAME instance, but with a bumped retain count. Every time you call Free on that sound, the retain count goes down, and when it reaches zero, the sound is freed from memory. Calling GetSound again will reload that sound.

TODO

• Support limiting the number of times that each sound can overlap.
• Support freeing up memory after overlapping the sound sound too many times.
• Support for streaming long sounds (like MP3s) for music playing.
• More platforms?