Question

I am using AVAudioPLayer to do the audio for my game. I have the following code in a method in a seperate class, which is called every time I want the ‘boing’ sound to play. Problem is, it leaks huge amounts of memory, to the point where the game becomes unplayable. Now i’m not releasing any of the pointers in the method, because at the time I only had one. But now I have 10 of these methods.

What is the best way to release the pointers in tis case? (Yes, I have tried releasing straight after [boing play];, this solves the leak (obviously) but the sound dosen’t play so theres no point.

    -(void)playBoing {
        int x = (arc4random()%3)+1;
        NSString *path = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"/boing_0%i.aif", x];

        NSString* resourcePath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] resourcePath];
        resourcePath = [resourcePath stringByAppendingString:path];

        AVAudioPlayer *boing = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:
                                [NSURL fileURLWithPath:resourcePath] error:nil];

        boing.delegate = self;
        boing.volume = 1;

        [boing play];
}

Answer 1

It’s possible there’s a better solution, but I’ve had similar problems where releasing right away killed my process. This is the solution I took. Again, there may be better out there, but for a quick fix, it should do the trick.

In your header file, create the following:

AVAudioPlayer *boing;

Then in -(void)playBoing, do as you did, but change

AVAudioPlayer *boing = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:
                        [NSURL fileURLWithPath:resourcePath] error:nil];

to

if (boing != nil) {
    boing = nil;
    [boing release];
}
boing = [[AVAudioPlayer alloc] initWithContentsOfURL:
         [NSURL fileURLWithPath:resourcePath] error:nil];

This should ensure that there’s only one instance of boing allocated at a time