Sound effects

Sound effects are small audio samples, usually no longer than a few seconds, that are played back on specific game events such as a character jumping or shooting a gun.

Sound effects can be stored in various formats. Libgdx supports MP3, OGG and WAV files.

Sound effects are represented by the Sound interface. Loading a sound effect works as follows:

Sound sound = Gdx.audio.newSound(Gdx.files.internal("data/mysound.mp3"));

This loads an audio file called "mysound.mp3" from the internal directory data.

Once we have the sound loaded we can play it back:

sound.play(1.0f);

This will playback the sound effect once, at full volume. The play method on a single Sound instance can be called many times in a row, e.g. for a sequence of shots in a game, and will be overlaid accordingly.

More fine-grained control is available. Every call to Sound.play() returns a long which identifies that sound instance. Using this handle we can modify that specific playback instance:

long id = sound.play(1.0f); // play new sound and keep handle for further manipulation
sound.stop(id);             // stops the sound instance immediately
sound.setPitch(id, 2);      // increases the pitch to 2x the original pitch

id = sound.play(1.0f);      // plays the sound a second time, this is treated as a different instance
sound.setPan(id, -1, 1);    // sets the pan of the sound to the left side at full volume
sound.setLooping(id);       // keeps the sound looping
sound.stop(id);             // stops the looping sound 

Note that these modifier methods will not work in the JavaScript/WebGL back-end for now.

Once you no longer need a Sound, make sure you dispose of it:

sound.dispose();

Accessing the sound after you disposed of it will result in undefined errors.