Tutorial:Audio

In LÖVE, audio is the domain of the love.audio module, which uses OpenAL for playback. love.audio has only one type of audio object - a Source. You can load audio and play it like so:

sound = love.audio.newSource("pling.wav", "static") -- the "static" tells LÖVE to load the file into memory, good for short sound effects
music = love.audio.newSource("techno.ogg") -- if "static" is omitted, LÖVE will stream the file from disk, good for longer music tracks
love.audio.play(sound)
love.audio.play(music)

Formats

LÖVE supports a lot of audio formats, thanks to the love.sound module, which handles all the decoding. Supported formats include:

• MP3
• Ogg Vorbis
• WAVE
• and just about every tracker format you can think of - XM, MOD, and over twenty others.

Ogg Vorbis is the recommended format. Others may have minor quirks. For example, the WAVE decoder adds a few seconds of silence at the end and the MP3 decoder may also pad a few samples depending on what encoder was used. These issues come from the libraries LÖVE uses to decode the audio files and can't be fixed in LÖVE directly.

Static vs. Streaming

Keep in mind that, if you pass love.audio.newSource "static" as a second argument, the sound file will be expanded into memory, so if you load a 5MB compressed .ogg file that way, it would consume ~50MB RAM when fully decompressed. Consider not using "static" in such cases.

If you omit the "static", the audio will be streamed from the file as it's played, something that saves a lot of memory when you're dealing with massive files.

Audio control

To pause, stop, change volume, looping, pitch, etc., simply call the relevant method of a Source.

src1 = love.audio.newSource("bang.wav", "static")
src2 = love.audio.newSource("bgm.mp3")

src1:setVolume(0.9) -- 90% of ordinary volume
src1:setPitch(0.5) -- one octave lower
src2:setVolume(0.7)

love.audio.play(src1)
love.audio.play(src2)

Further details can be found in the Source documentation.

See Also

• TEsound - A sound manager which makes it easier to use sound effects and music
• Minimalist Sound Manager - A snippet that makes usage of love.audio easier and automatically manages sources

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