With that I-want-to-be-a-Victorian-poet-but-all-I-can-write-is-C++ subject out of the way, I'm just about to start out with some more heavy-duty sound programming than in Galder (async playing of ' snd' resources). This means: music, ambient sounds and sound effects, up to eight at the same time.

Now, I'm very inclined to take the QuickTime path. Now, my question is: would to be just too darn slow to use QuickTime and MP3 for all of this? I'm writing a fairly fast-paced side scroller, and I hope to be able to run on 350 MhZ B/W G3:s, so what are my hopes here? I guess running MP3 for the background music would be OK, probably as well for ambient sounds, but when it comes to sound effects, isn't that too slow? And if so, what are the ways to get sounds into Sound Manager in Carbon? (I'd like to avoid ' snd':s)

When doing MP3 in QT, are they decoded once and played many times, or are they decoded each time I use them? (Is it possible for me to load and decompress all level sounds at level init, and then use decompressed sound buffers until level end? And if so, does QT do cheap mixing of this, or will the CPU go red-hot?

Lots of questions, happy for any input.

Thanks!

Ask the makers of Airburst and Bushfire how they did the QuickTime sounds.

I suggest you get Director MX. Very advanced, OpenGL and QuickTime accelerated version of Flash. Director MX is fast and has awesome sound managment tools and QuickTime support.

You should look at the MP3 playing code we have on iDevGames and see for yourself.

For Bushfire, we just used Quicktime to play the mp3s as movies direct from the disk (standard QT movie load and play). For Airburst it was a bit more tricky as we had to make the short mp3 clips play in sequences (which changed as the action got faster), so I loaded them all into RAM (there's a force to RAM option in the QT library) and set up an interupt to call back as each clip finished (by using the relevant QT functions to calculate the length of the clip).

The playback interupt routines were probably the hardest part of Airburst. I'm still undecided what I'm doing for Airburst Extreme yet as we plan to include some full length tracks (it will be CD based).

We still used 'snd' resources for all the sound effects though. Very practical, using the QuickTime Movie Player to export our sounds as sfil files

Thanks, I'm going with QT MP3 as long as it takes me (also see http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthrea...adid=2432, http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthrea...eadid=2433) for further discussions on my sorrows. However, if Airburst does sound resources, then I want to, too.

Well, thanks for your help!