Playing back the music and sound effects

LibGDX provides cross-platform audio playback for prerecorded audio files of the following three supported file formats:

• .wav (RIFF WAVE)

• .mp3 (MPEG-2 Audio Layer III)

• .ogg (Ogg Vorbis)

  Note

  However, Ogg support is not available for the robovm version because iOS doesn't support it.

There are two interfaces, namely Music and Sound. They serve two different use cases of playing back audio files. In terms of LibGDX, sounds are audio files that usually play no longer than one second; think of laser or machine gun sounds. Audio files used as Sound objects are loaded and decoded so that they can be directly sent to the audio device. Obviously, the decoded audio data kept in memory can heavily increase the overall memory usage. On the contrary, audio files are used as the Music objects are streamed, which means that only the necessary portion of it is decoded and held in memory. Therefore, the Music objects should be used for playing long audio files, such as...