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 .ogg file, 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 game 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, we would declare an object of type SoundPool and an int identifier for every sound effect we intend to use. In this theoretical case, 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...