[jasondavidcarr]

Hello,

I'm more than willing to send off $25 if I can get this resolved. I'm trying to play an MP3 as background music for a game. I'm currently testing on the 8300 series emulator and a Curve 8330.

The code looks like this:

try
{
    InputStream stream = getClass().getResourceAsStream("/MenuMusic.mp3");
    Player player = Manager.createPlayer(stream, "audio/mpeg3");
    player.setLoopCount(-1);
    player.start();
}
catch (MediaException ex)
{
}
catch (IOException ex)
{
}

MenuMusic.mp3 is roughly 512KB and is built (compiled into) the COD file by the JDE. I encoded the MP3 with LAME, at the minimum VBR setting. The music is roughly a minute and a half long.

When I run the code in the emulator, the music plays, but it is extremely choppy and it slows the rest of my game to a crawl. When I run it on the actual 8330 device it slows the game to a crawl, but never plays the music.

Obviously, I expect the music to slow down the game significantly, but I know performance should be much better than this (and it should at least start playing) because I can play an MP3 manually in the background on the device without significantly affecting performance of the game. Therefore, I know the device is capable of it.

Referencing the above code, I've also tried calling the Player class's realize and prefetch methods before calling the start method, but I got pretty much the same results in testing.

Any information would be appreciated, and I promise I'll pay up!

Thanks,
Jason

[bbtrapped]

Wirelessly posted (@ 88 mph)

Try a midi. I had no success with MP3. Midi works just fine.

[hippocamp software]

are you playing the audio in a seperate thread to your game loop?

[remaerdlacidar]

I would try midis as well if possible

[jasondavidcarr]

Thank you all for responding.

I have lots of experience with MIDIs but that's not at all what I'm going for, unfortunately.

I've tried playing the audio both in the game loop and in a separate thread, but it appears that the music starts playing in a separate thread automatically, anyway, when you start the music. There was no difference in performance/end results when I switched between a separate thread and the same game loop thread.

It would be pretty disappointing if I couldn't get this to work, as I've already written and recorded the music and figured it would work fine since the APIs appear to support it. It also seemed technically possible because of the fact that the device can easily play back an MP3 song (using the built in media software) while the game is playing. I sure hope somehow there's a way to make it work...

[jasondavidcarr]

I should note that I tried a different method as well, but unfortunately I couldn't get it to work at all. I tried the net.rim.device.api.media method, which looks like is meant to play a streaming file (or a local file). This may be the solution, but I haven't had any luck with it. Does anyone have experience using these calls?

[zechariahs]

This article - How To - Play audio in an application, has a nice code snippet.

There's also a long thread on the BlackBerry Support Forums: Problem playing audio in my application (Storm). The thread talks about permission issues, etc that are related to playing media.

RIM's Multimedia Guide (pdf) is probably a good thing to review as well.