Storage for audio samples defining a sound.

A sound buffer holds the data of a sound, which is an array of audio samples.

A sample is a 16 bits signed integer that defines the amplitude of the sound at a given time. The sound is then reconstituted by playing these samples at a high rate (for example, 44100 samples per second is the standard rate used for playing CDs). In short, audio samples are like texture pixels, and a sf.SoundBuffer is similar to a sf.Texture.

A sound buffer can be loaded from a file (see loadFromFile() for the complete list of supported formats), from memory, from a custom stream (see sf.InputStream) or directly from an array of samples. It can also be saved back to a file.

Sound buffers alone are not very useful: they hold the audio data but cannot be played. To do so, you need to use the sf.Sound class, which provides functions to play/pause/stop the sound as well as changing the way it is outputted (volume, pitch, 3D position, ...). This separation allows more flexibility and better performances: indeed a sf.SoundBuffer is a heavy resource, and any operation on it is slow (often too slow for real-time applications). On the other side, a sf.Sound is a lightweight object, which can use the audio data of a sound buffer and change the way it is played without actually modifying that data. Note that it is also possible to bind several sf.Sound instances to the same sf.SoundBuffer.

It is important to note that the sf.Sound instance doesn't copy the buffer that it uses, it only keeps a reference to it. Thus, a sf.SoundBuffer must not be destructed while it is used by a sf.Sound (i.e. never write a function that uses a local sf.SoundBuffer instance for loading a sound).

Usage example:

// Declare a new sound buffer
var buffer = new SoundBuffer.FromFile("sound.wav"))
 
// Load it from a file
if (buffer == null) {
    // error...
}
 
// Create a sound source and bind it to the buffer
var sound1 = new Sound();
sound1.setBuffer(buffer);
 
// Play the sound
sound1.play();
 
// Create another sound source bound to the same buffer
var sound2 = new Sound();
sound2.setBuffer(buffer);
 
// Play it with a higher pitch -- the first sound remains unchanged
sound2.setPitch(2);
sound2.play();

See also:

sf.Sound, sf.SoundBufferRecorder