Remove the default audio Source type

slime73 commented 9 years ago

Original report by Alex Szpakowski (Bitbucket: slime73, GitHub: slime73).

Currently love.audio.newSource(filename) defaults to creating a streaming Source. It might be a bit more convenient for quickly getting things up and running, but it has a few downsides:

Streaming sources use CPU (a fairly significant amount, on mobile) while playing, since they decode on-demand.
Since streaming sources decode their data on-demand, a short streaming sound played multiple times will redundantly decode itself every time its played.
Some OpenAL backends (e.g. Apple's on iOS) seem to have trouble with lots of streaming sources playing at once.

Static sources have none of those issues, but they also take a long time to do the full decode when they load, if the sound file is big or long. Since each Source type has unique downsides I don't think it makes much sense to have a default, even though it would be slightly less convenient for new users.

slime73 commented 9 years ago

Original comment by Landon “Karai” Manning (Bitbucket: karai17, GitHub: karai17).

Would it be a completely bad idea to set a different default based on the length of the audio? If a file is less than 10 seconds, it could be inferred as a sound effect, otherwise inferred as music?

slime73 commented 9 years ago

Original comment by Alex Szpakowski (Bitbucket: slime73, GitHub: slime73).

The length of a given sound file can't really be reliably determined until it's been completely loaded (i.e. not streaming).

File size could be used, but either way it would kind of be a 'hidden magic number' that could cause side effects in code that didn't expect the default argument value to change based on external factors.

slime73 commented 9 years ago

Original comment by Landon “Karai” Manning (Bitbucket: karai17, GitHub: karai17).

I recall determining a file's length, especially OGG, can be finicky (See: In The Groove 2 r21 patching). I generally don't think magic numbering is a good idea either.

slime73 commented 8 years ago

Original comment by Bart van Strien (Bitbucket: bartbes, GitHub: bartbes).

Remove the default source type (resolves #1082)

love2d / love

Remove the default audio Source type #1087