Sound effects in SpriteKit - memory and frame rate issues

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Created Nov ’21

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I am working on my first game. I was using SKAction.playSoundFileNamed() to play .wav files in my assets, but this was causing problematic memory use growth. After looking online and reading that method has been linked to leaks, I switched to SKAudioNodes. I have added many of those to my scene, and they work, but the frame rate is lower now than before. Any suggestions?

I had used this (but I had memory usage growing):

let hiss = SKAction.playSoundFileNamed("hiss.wav", waitForCompletion: false)
run(hiss)

Now I have this (but frame rates are down):

let hiss: SKAudioNode = SKAudioNode(fileNamed: "hiss.wav")
hiss.autoplayLooped = false
hiss.isPositional = false
addChild(hiss)
hiss.run(SKAction.play())

Any tips?

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Answer 1

flockOfBirds OP

Nov ’21

still researching... this may relate to this older thread: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/44637: "Sounds like you are treading the same path I went my friend. I also tried using AVAudioPlayer for music and ambient sounds. But in the end, the whole mess of AVAudioPlayer and SKAudioNode just didn't work well. And once past anything trivial, the performance of SKAudioNode is not great. ALL SKAudioNode sounds are read (streamed) from files instead of memory buffers at the AVAudioEngine level, and this starts to impact on frame rate and audio quality once you have more than a few sounds to deal with."

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