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 file, keeping an identifying reference to it via an integer ID, and, of course, playing the sound. When the sound is played, it is played in a non-blocking manner (using a thread behind the scenes) that does not interfere with the smooth running of our app 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 shortly.

Next, in our Kotlin code, we declare an object of the SoundPool type and an Int identifier for each sound effect we intend to use, as shown in the following code. We will also declare another Int called nowPlaying, which we can use to track which sound is currently playing; we will see how we do this shortly:

var sp: SoundPool
var idFX1 ...