Swing Hacks

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Chapter 10, Audio

#71 Play a Sound with JavaSound

HACK

Realistically, you actually need to host the applet (HTML and code) on a

web server and access it via a URL. If you have access to a web server, put

index.html and AppletAudio.class in their own web directory, along with

some known-to-work audio files, then access it remotely with a browser.

Type in a URL to one of those audio files by hand and try to load it. This

time, it should work (finally).

But what formats are supported? Back in Java 1.0 and 1.1,

AudioClips had to

be encoded in mono at 8,000 Hz with µ-law encoding…which was pretty

awful. In Java 1.4.2, a few simple container formats are supported. AIFF and

WAV both work, but Mac OS X doesn’t support the .au format, which used

to be the only option (Windows can play .au, by the way). Also,

AudioClip

can’t play WAVs and AIFFs whose contents are compressed in any way.

And neither Mac nor Windows supports MP3 as

AudioClips.

You can also load audio from sites other than the one hosting your applet,

which seems contrary to the stringent applet security seen earlier.

So, using

java.awt.applet’s AudioClip means your application has to be an

applet, it can only run a handful of audio formats, and your media can’t be

local unless you go through the hassle of overriding the

SecurityManager for

the applet.

As you might imagine, early Java developers demanded a replacement.

H A C K

#71

Play a Sound with ...