Swing Hacks

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Chapter 10

C H A P T E R T E N

Audio

Hacks 70–78

Sound is underrated as a useful tool for building good user interfaces. A lot

of developers balk at the thought of sound support, imagining an office full

of noisy machines, emitting a beeping cacophony more like a 1980s video-

game arcade than a place of business. But on the other hand, don’t you

appreciate it when you get a nice little audible cue? For example:

• When your IM buddy logs in

• When your CD has finished burning

• When your gigantic upload has finished

• When someone is trying to hack into your network and you’re not even

looking at the screen

And beyond these kinds of uses, don’t forget the whole realm of applica-

tions that are, by their nature, all about sound: music players, sound editors,

voice chat, and VoIP, etc. Clearly,

java.awt.Toolkit.beep( ) is not going to

cut it.

Java has two built-in options for playing simple sounds in memory: applet

AudioClips and JavaSound. Because of their limitations, this chapter will also

look at two extensions: Java Media Framework (JMF) and QuickTime for

Java (QTJ). Later in the chapter, you’ll find more sophisticated JavaSound

coverage, including how to visualize an in-memory sound clip, and how to

play sounds too big to fit in memory.