I'm trying to write a simple "drum-machine" type app. in Android. Currently I'm prototyping it in Processing.
I'm looking for the way to play audio sound samples using the Android SDK.
In particular I need :
- to play the sample in a separate thread, so that it doesn't hold up the main UI thread
- to be able to play multiple samples simultaneously
- to be able to play the same sample simultaneously (eg. if a particular sound has a longish decay, to be able to launch a new version of it while the other is finishing)
- NOT to have to have the overhead of loading the audio file, creating and instantiating a player object each time I play the sample
- I've read a bit about AAudio, but I need to work on older versions of Android (ideally back to 4, but at least 5)
- ideally I want to do this in Java, not have to fall down to using the ndk if I can possibly avoid it.
So I'm thinking I want to load my samples into buffers in memory, have some kind of pool of "player" type objects, each of which can iterate through the buffer independently, in their own thread, while sending to a common audio stream.
Any idea what I should be using for this.
Most of what I found seems to be monolithic "audio player" type objects which do everything from loading and playing an audio sample when invoked. I think I'm looking for lower-level components than this. But I'm not sure where to look for them.
