The Soundpool class

The SoundPool class allows us to hold and manipulate a collection of sound FX; literally, a pool of sounds. The class handles everything from decompressing a sound file such as a .wav or a .ogg, keeping an identifying reference to it via an integer id and, of course, playing the sound. When the sound is played, it is done so in a non-blocking manner (using a thread behind the scenes) that does not interfere with the smooth running of our app or our user's interaction with it.

The first thing we need to do is add the sound effects to a folder called assets in the main folder of the game project. We will do this for real shortly.

Next, in our Java code, declare an object of the SoundPool type and an int identifier for each and every sound effect we intend to use. We also need to declare another int called nowPlaying, which we can use to track which sound is currently playing. We will see how we do this shortly:

// create an identifier
SoundPool sp;
int nowPlaying =...