I wanted to offer a quick bit of advice regarding playing sounds in Android. First, most developers will find that the MediaPlayer and SoundPool widgets are equally frustrating to work with. MediaPlayer is too high-level, and SoundPool isn’t low enough.

Anyways, my experience in audio is such that as an app increases in complexity, one rapidly descends the ladder of audio frameworks to arrive at the lowest one. So just get used to working with both MediaPlayer and SoundPool, as you’ll probably need to use both for separate purposes.

One big disadvantage of SoundPool is that it is not capable of keeping large samples in memory as it decodes them to raw PCM. Even so, an activity that is graphically rich with sound tends to hit the memory limit pretty quickly. Be sure to release() and null references to either SoundPool or MediaPlayer objects after you are finished with them (and preferably before the activity finishes).

Also, with both MediaPlayer and SoundPool, one should be ultra-paranoid about failed initialization and NullPointerExceptions. This is especially true if you need the sound player in the Activity as a member field. If this is the case, you will almost certainly need to override onPause() and onResume() to re-initialize the sound resources if necessary.

Audio performance varies widely between Android vendors, so you run a high risk of “works for me” unless you aggressively try/catch most audio operations, as you’ll find that many phones will return null references when trying to create new references.

Questions or comments? Send an email to . Copyright (c) 2012 Teragon Audio. All Rights Reserved.