SoundBankPlayer: Using OpenAL to Play Musical Instruments in Your iOS App
Suppose you want your iPhone or iPad app to play all the notes from a certain instrument, such as a piano. There are 88 unique notes on a piano so you could sample each note of a real piano and put those 88 sound samples in your app. That’s exactly what some iPhone piano apps do; you can see this for yourself when you examine their application bundles.
For many apps, sampling every note that an instrument can produce is overkill and it will make the application bundle unnecessarily large, especially if you have more than one instrument.
One solution to this problem is the use of SoundFonts. The SoundFont format was originally created by Creative Labs for the Sound Blaster range of sound cards. Instead of requiring a unique sample for each note, the SoundFont allows a single sample to play a range of notes. Now it’s possible to create a realistic piano sound with 8 samples instead of 88.
SoundFonts Simplified
For my Reverse Chord Finder Pro app, I needed a way to play notes from multiple instruments without making the app’s download much larger. I found some good piano and guitar SoundFont files but I did not want to write a complete SoundFont implementation. Instead, I wrote a simple class, SoundBankPlayer, that works in a similar fashion but does not have all the features of a full SoundFont player.
SoundBankPlayer doesn’t read actual SoundFont files but “sound banks”, which are simply PLIST files that describe which notes should be played by which sound samples. This makes it very easy to create new sound banks.
In this article I will explain how to use SoundBankPlayer and how it works internally. I will touch briefly on OpenAL because that is what SoundBankPlayer uses to play back the sounds. Continue reading…
