Sound stops game?

[Calender Man]

Hey, I'm using the PlaySound function for my game but when it plays, it stops the game until its finished playing. How do I get it to play without stopping the game?

I'm using PlaySound(TEXT("test.wav"), NULL, SND_FILENAME);

I tried using ASYNC but no sound is played.

[Moschops]

Did you try using SND_FILENAME | SND_ASYNC ?

[Calender Man]

Yeah I tried that too, no sound plays.

[andywestken]

Can you get your sound to play with a little test app which just does something like

PlaySound(TEXT("test.wav"), NULL, SND_FILENAME | SND_ASYNC);
Sleep(5000); // or whatever you can stand!
PlaySound(NULL, NULL, SND_FILENAME | SND_ASYNC);
Sleep(1000);

[Calender Man]

Yeah that works, but it still makes the game stop because of sleep, I tried to reduce the time it sleeps for but the game noticeably stops while playing it and ruins the game.

[andywestken]

OK. But that was just an experiment, to make sure there was no underlying problem with the async sound.

So now I'm curious about what your doing after you start the non-playing async sound.

(But as I'm in Europe, I won't be back to check the answer till tomorrow now...)

[Calender Man]

Not sure what you mean, after its meant to play the game just continues as usual.

[Michael McCody]

Try this.

 
#include <windows.h>
#pragma comment(lib, "winmm.lib")

int main()
{
  PlaySound("C:\\beep.WAV",    NULL, SND_ASYNC);
  return 0;
}

[andywestken]

I was wondering if there was something going on which was disrupting the sound playback. If the code runs ok with the sleep, then something appears to be upsetting the playback when you don't sleep.

Out of interest, you could try playing the sound on another thread.

Declare a thread proc

DWORD WINAPI PlaySoundThreadProc (LPVOID threadParam)
{
    // could prob play sound sync here instead
    PlaySound(TEXT("test.wav"), NULL, SND_FILENAME | SND_ASYNC);
    Sleep(5000); // or whatever you can stand!
    PlaySound(NULL, NULL, SND_FILENAME | SND_ASYNC);
    Sleep(1000);

    return 0;
}

And lo launch

HANDLE hThread = CreateThread(
    NULL, // default security
    0, // default stack size
    PlaySoundThreadProc,
    NULL, // no param
    0, // no flags
    NULL ); // don't need the ID

if(NULL != hThread)
{
    // close handle immediately. Thread will exit when it's done
    // (this does assume the games carries on running long enough for
    // the sound to play)
    CloseHandle(hThread);
}
else
{
    DWORD dwError = GetLastError();
    cerr << "Thread failed to start: error = " << dwError << endl;
}

Andy

PS @Michael McCody -- as you exit main immediately after calling PlaySound to start playing the sound, the system prob doesn't even have enough time to load the file before the program exits!