The SoundPool class

The SoundPool class allows us to hold and manipulate a collection of sound effects – literally, a pool of sounds. The class handles everything from decompressing a sound file such as a .wav or a .ogg to 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 users' 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 to use as an ID for each sound effect we intend to use. We also declare another int called nowPlaying, which we can use to track which sound is currently playing, and we will see how we do this shortly:

// create an ID
SoundPool sp;
int...