Sounds are not reference counted?

nat12

Hello,
I noticed in the execution log of our game, when we use the same png twice it is loaded once then the refcount increased (very good thing), but when we use the same wav twice the log message say it is created twice (see extract from our log at the end of this message)
It is the wav really loaded twice in memory? if yes, do exist a quick way to evitate the duplication without to have to rewrite our game scripts to explicitly share sounds?

log: create sound: Audio/select.wav
log: Inserting Menu/Popup/buttons_yes.png to the texture cache. Total memory is 42048 KB.
log: Inserting Menu/Popup/buttons_no.png to the texture cache. Total memory is 42112 KB.
log: create sound: Audio/select.wav
log: Increasing refcount of Menu/Popup/buttons_yes.png. New refcount is 2.
log: Increasing refcount of Menu/Popup/buttons_no.png. New refcount is 2.

techdojo

You could load all your sounds once at the top of main into a global table and then reference them yourself.

Could this be due to the fact that if you try and play a sound again whilst it's already playing then things might get messed up?

If that is the case then you might need to load multiple copies of any sounds you intend to play that might be triggered at the same time.

atilim

An addition to @techdojo, yes, they are not reference counted as Textures. Therefore you should be more careful about not loading Sounds more than once (on the other hand, the only side effect is memory usage and nothing else)

This issue is on the roadmap http://bugs.giderosmobile.com/issues/71 and I'll implement reference counting for Sounds.

nat12

understood, unluckily memory usage is our main issue, so we start to review sound management in our code

atilim

Before starting to change your code, let me paste here an alternative Sound class that allows caching/reusing sounds. Give me a couple of minutes...

atilim

Can you put this to your init.lua? This new Sound class reuses a Sound instance if it's already on memory.

OriginalSound = Sound   local soundInstances = setmetatable({}, {__mode = "v"})   Sound = Core.class()   function Sound:init(filename) if soundInstances[filename] ~= nil then self.sound = soundInstances[filename] else self.sound = OriginalSound.new(filename) soundInstances[filename] = self.sound end end   function Sound:play(...) return self.sound:play(...) end   function Sound:getLength() return self.sound:getLength() end

nat12

Thank You Atilim, we will try this as soon as possible.