Learning XNA 3.0

Chapter 5. Sound Effects and Audio

All right, you've got yourself a solid design and you're ready to move forward. At the end of the previous chapter, you ended up with something that actually resembles a game: you have a user-controlled sprite that can move around the screen, and once it comes in contact with one of the "enemy" sprites, the game ends. The main drawback is that the enemy sprites don't move or do anything yet, so the game really isn't all that great—but nonetheless, it's a good start.

For now, let's focus on another problem: there's no audio in your game. What kind of game has no audio or sound effects? I'll tell you: a lame game. We aren't in the business of making idiotic applications—we're XNA developers, and that means we're going to make something awesome. So let's do it. In this chapter, you'll add some audio and sound effects to your application.

With the XNA Framework 3.0, there are a couple of different ways to implement sound. In previous versions of XNA, developers used a tool called the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT) exclusively for audio. Using XACT, developers can create compilations of sound files that are processed by the content pipeline and implemented using the XNA Framework's sound API. With XNA 3.0, XACT can still be used to implement audio for the PC and the Xbox 360. However, because the Zune does not support the XACT engine, the XNA team has added a separate API for use in Zune development. The simplified sound API ...