5.2.1 Music

A soundtrack can be played with the class Sound:

 
Sound soundtrack; 
 
void InitPre() 
{ 
5   EE_INIT(); 
} 
 
bool Init() 
{ 
10   soundtrack.create(=== drop your audio file here ===); 
   return true; 
} 
 
void Shut() {} 
15 
bool Update() 
{ 
   if(Kb.bp(KB_ESC)) return false; 
 
20   if(Kb.bp(KB_SPACE)) 
   { 
      if(soundtrack.playing()) 
      { 
         soundtrack.pause(); 
25      } else 
      { 
         soundtrack.play(); 
      } 
   } 
30   return true; 
}
 

There’s a few things to remember, though:

• Before you can use a sound, it must be loaded from disk. This is done with the create() function. It needs at least one argument: the audio file. Like with images, you can simply drag the file from your resources on to your function. You will want to do this inside of the Init() function, because you don’t want to load your file from disk at every update.
• play() will cause the sound to start playing.
• pause() will pause the sound. Who would have guessed, right? When you use play after pause, the sound will continue right where it left off.
• Instead of pause() you can also use stop(). Now when you start playing again, the sound will start from the beginning.

The create() function also has a few optional arguments. Here’s an example with all of them:

 
soundtrack.create(=== audio file ===, true, 0.8, VOLUME_MUSIC);
 

But what do they mean, little grasshopper?

1. The first argument is known. That’s the audio file.
2. the second argument is the loop value. It can be true or false and is used to indicate if you’d like the sound to ‘loop’. (Which mean it will start from the top when it is finished.) The default value is false.
3. Next comes the volume. Volume scales from zero to one, with a default of 1.
4. The last argument is a ‘channel’. Esenthel has several channels for playing audio. If you don’t use this argument, the sound will use the channel ‘VOLUME_FX’. It is generally a good idea to use several channels for different types of sounds, because the volume of a channel can be changed. It makes it easy to implement volume changes for music, fx or voices.