Question

ok so im very new to android development and fairly new to java and i dont fully understand threads and inner classes and such.
i have my main activity (MyActivity) with all my ui stuff in it.
i have an inner class (MyTask) extends AsyncTask with a thread running that changes the ui

public final class MyActivity extends Activity{
blah..
class MyTask extends AsyncTask<Integer, Integer, Void>{
@Override
        protected Void doInBackground(Integer... params) {

             t = new Thread(){
                 @Override
                public void run() {
                  while(true) {
//do ui change stuff here

this works fine.

i would like to play a sound using AudioTrack in streaming mode that is triggered by the events in MyTask.
however this will interfere with the ui stuff.
whats the best way to handle the sound playing code so it doesnt slow the ui down?

thank you

Answer 1

My original suggestion would have been to use a service however, upon researching it looks like that won’t be the right direction to go.
from: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Service.html

Note that services, like other application objects, run in the main
thread of their hosting process. This means that, if your service is
going to do any CPU intensive (such as MP3 playback) or blocking (such
as networking) operations, it should spawn its own thread in which to
do that work. More information on this can be found in Processes and
Threads. The IntentService class is available as a standard
implementation of Service that has its own thread where it schedules
its work to be done.
I may be possible to use the Service in the “intent service” way but that seems like it’s not a common way to use it.

Based on the threads link from the link above I would suggest a worker thread, you can find it here:
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/processes-and-threads.html

As long as you’re not planning on updating UI elements from it, if so there are additional suggestions/links under the worker thread heading that describe additional considerations.

Good luck, I hope this helps