User:Zorg/Manual:Audio/1

Sound - Basics

Introduction

So, what's audio?

It's everything regarding sound, a game's background music, ambience, effects, voice acting.

Most released games that had any amount of work put into them have audio in one way or another, with the two exceptions being art-games that have no audio for some philosophical reason, or really old pong-era games where there wasn't a way to have it.

How does LÖVE do it?

Löve has two namespaces for sound related objects and methods. love.sound and love.audio.

To understand what's happening, consult the image to the right.

SoundData

are objects that contain individual sound samples. Either short sounds or they can hold even long tracks as well, though they would use a lot of RAM, since they are decoded into samplepoints.

Examples

Our vocal player

Insert baker Sven joke here...

local source = love.audio.newSource('sound.ogg')

Play a sound

Now that we have a source we'll want to play the sound. Thankfully, there's a function called Source:play() which does just that.

source:play()

When play() is called the sound will continue to play until it reaches the end of the sound. We only have to call play once to start the sound.

Stop a sound

What if we want to stop the sound? As you might guess, there is a corresponding function to play() called Source:stop().

source:stop()

When stop() is called, the sound will stop playing and it will also rewind the sound to the beginning. However, there is an issue. Calling this function will automatically rewind the sound, making it impossible to "pause" the sound and keep the current position. But, there is a solution: Source:pause().

Pause a sound

When pause() is called, the sound will stop playing, but it will keep its current position.

source:pause()

To unpause the sound, you can call Source:resume() or Source:play().

source:resume()

When resume() is called, if the sound is paused, then it will start playing the sound at the location it was paused. The difference between play() and resume() is resume() will only start playing the sound again if it was paused. If stop() was used, then resume() has no effect.

Putting it all together

Now that you know the basics, let's make a program that uses all of these functions.

local source

function love.load()
    source = love.audio.newSource('sound.ogg')
end

function love.keypressed(key)
    if key == "p" then
        source:pause() 
    end

    if key == "return" then
        source:play()
    end

    if key == "backspace" then
        source:stop()
    end
end

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