How can I play sound in Java?

Question

I want to be able to play sound files in my program. Where should I look?

Answer 1

For whatever reason, the top answer by wchargin was giving me a null pointer error when I was calling this.getClass().getResourceAsStream().

What worked for me was the following:

void playSound(String soundFile) {
    File f = new File("./" + soundFile);
    AudioInputStream audioIn = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(f.toURI().toURL());  
    Clip clip = AudioSystem.getClip();
    clip.open(audioIn);
    clip.start();
}

And I would play the sound with:

 playSound("sounds/effects/sheep1.wav");

sounds/effects/sheep1.wav was located in the base directory of my project in Eclipse (so not inside the src folder).