How to determine the suitable MA_RESOURCE_MANAGER_PAGE_SIZE_IN_MILLISECONDS size ?

[xielock]

When I play sounds through streaming, we calculate the allocated memory using MA_RESOURCE_MANAGER_PAGE_SIZE_IN_MILLISECONDS. However, when there are many sound streams playing concurrently, it can take too long to start the first playback and require too much memory. So how to determine the suitable size ?

[mackron]

Sorry I didn't respond sooner. I missed this one.

You wouldn't normally want to change MA_RESOURCE_MANAGER_PAGE_SIZE_IN_MILLISECONDS, and you wouldn't normally want to be streaming a lot of sounds at once. Streams were intended to be used for large sounds like music tracks in a game. I don't recommend using stream for small sounds. To get the absolute minimum amount of memory usage, you would want to initialize a ma_decoder, and then pass that into ma_sound_init_from_data_source(). This would bypass the stream altogether. However this has it's own drawbacks like reading from disk from the audio thread which will be slow and won't scale well.

You will want to find a balance for what works for you. Here are some guidelines:

• Use a stream for long sounds like music tracks.
• MA_SOUND_FLAG_DECODE will load and decode the sound and store the entire thing in memory. It takes the longest to load due to the decoding process, takes the most amount of memory because it's stored in memory decompressed, but the runtime speed is the fastest.
• Not using MA_SOUND_FLAG_DECODE will be the fast to load, but will be slower at runtime because it decodes on the fly.
• Using ma_decoder + ma_sound_init_from_data_source() will initialize fast and will have the lowest memory usage, but will have the slowest runtime speed because it'll be reading from disk and decoding on the fly.

[xielock]

Thanks for your reply. I will consider it later.