Playing low latency sounds with QSoundEffect

The project application ch11-drum-machine displays four SoundEffectWidget widgets: kickWidget, snareWidget, hihatWidget, and crashWidget.

Each SoundEffectWidget widget displays a QLabel and a QPushButton. The label displays the sound name. If the button is clicked, a sound is played.

The Qt Multimedia module provides two main ways to play an audio file:

• QMediaPlayer: This file can play songs, movies, and Internet radio with various input formats
• QSoundEffect: This file can play low-latency .wav files

This project example is a virtual drum machine, so we are using a QSoundEffect object. The first step to use a QSoundEffect is to update your .pro file like this:

QT       += core gui multimedia 

Then you can initialize the sound. Here is an example:

QUrl urlKick("qrc:/sounds/kick.wav"); 
QUrl urlBetterKick = QUrl::fromLocalFile("/home/better-kick.wav"); 
 
QSoundEffect soundEffect; ...