How to play audio in Java Application

Question

I\'m making a java application and I need to play audio. I\'m playing mainly small sound files of my cannon firing (its a cannon shooting game) and the projectiles exploding

Answer 1

The problem with this is that my entire program stops until the sound file is finished, or at least nearly finished.

This screams a threading issue. Have you tried playing the sound in a background thread? By the way, is this a Swing program? If so, use a SwingWorker to play the sound. There are many reasons for this, but one primary reason is that it's easy to track the state of the thread via the PropertyChangeListener support built in to SwingWorker.