the easiest ways to play an audio clip are the discouraged ones

Thu Jan 11 18:43:47 UTC 2024

Thanks for raising that.  Since I can’t comment on that issue directly, let me respond here to the claim by Alex Z. that “it’s not so bad”:
I agree that the code snippet he posted doesn’t look too bad, at least for the async case.
But!!  Consider the following:

  1.  We never closed the stream.  Is this “fine” or are we leaking an OS file handle?

We also never closed the clip.  Who knows what that leaks?  Maybe a thread or two?

(If we need not close these, the docs should make that clearer; I think we do.)

I see the JDK code has a concept of an auto-closing clip but the docs don’t mention it.

2.       But of course, we can’t close the clip or the stream, or else playback ends.

Thus we must wait for it to finish.  So the whole async approach is not viable.

The REAL way to do async is to actually to do sync, but on another thread.

3.       So how do we do sync then?  The example code by Alex Z uses busy looping.

Nice and simple for short clips, but pretty rude if the clip lasts more than a few seconds.

Easy fix:

try{Thread.sleep(clip. getMicrosecondLength/1000);}

catch(InterruptedException impossible){Thread.currentThread.interrupt();}

4.       This works for .wav files but not some of the more obscure file types that Java supports.

(In fact I don’t think it’s even guaranteed to work for ALL wav files.)

It works only for files encoded using PCM.

If you try to open a .au file, you’ll likely get an exception during playback.

To support EVERYTHING, we need to basically copy/paste the implementation of

com.sun.media.sound.Toolkit#getPCMConvertedAudioInputStream

Not so simple any more.

From: Philip Race <philip.race at oracle.com>
Sent: Monday, January 8, 2024 3:05 PM
To: Yagnatinsky, Mark : Markets Pre Trade <mark.yagnatinsky at barclays.com>; mickleness at gmail.com
Cc: client-libs-dev at openjdk.org
Subject: Re: the easiest ways to play an audio clip are the discouraged ones

CAUTION: This email originated from outside our organisation - philip.race at oracle.com<mailto:philip.race at oracle.com> Do not click on links, open attachments, or respond unless you recognize the sender and can validate the content is safe.
Mark,

It does seem like there's an ease of use gap here that will widen considerably when Applet is removed.
The Applet  AudioClip code is actually built on top of javax.sound public APIs so we should at least
find an alternative place to surface that functionality.
I submitted https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8323215<https://clicktime.symantec.com/15t5ejgC3n4Z2qVqt9Uzx?h=KL29DCPORvn7BrJRUY9MkcWCJvOw3Ti8Sa0X4iwSGd0=&u=https://bugs.openjdk.org/browse/JDK-8323215>

-phil.

On 1/1/24 10:27 PM, mark.yagnatinsky at barclays.com<mailto:mark.yagnatinsky at barclays.com> wrote:
Thanks Julian (and sorry for messing up the message threading… I’ll try not to do that next time).
It looks like you built a “full-fledged” audio player, and it took hundreds of lines of code.
Maybe that’s reasonable for a full-fledged audio player.
But it’s unfortunate that even a basic “fire and forget” feature to play an audio file should take lots of lines.

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