Play a sound every N milliseconds

Question

I\'m developing a metronome application. The user can select at runtime the bpm, and my app will play the \"tick\" sound accordingly. The \"tick\" is a single metronome \"sh

Answer 1

The alternative of looping through a synthesized sound seems to be the best choice for now. There was a great session about audio on Google I/O 2013 called High Performance Audio that I would certainly advice watching for having a deeper understanding on how the system works and what problems the developers will face when dealing with the audio latency. At about the 17:00 of the video, there is graph that shows jitter versus callbacks. In the perfect world that does not exist (oh really?), the jitter would be zero for all the scheduled audio callbacks made. But that is not the case, for there are jitters as high as 35 milliseconds or even greater, for the data in the graph was made using an unspecified ICS device and there are certainly worse scenarios than that.

So, as a metronome is a precision tool and these jitters are not good at all, the scheduled playback approach should be left aside. I even made an reasonably realiable metronome work with a synthesized sound using AudioTrack.

Hope it helps ^^