iPhone - music and sound effects

Questions & Answers
1

Hi guys,

I'm currently trying to implement audio in my game. My framerate drops significantly when I'm trying to play even one sound effect, not to mention background music.

For example:

If I collect an item a sound should play:

function OnTriggerEnter (collision : Collider)
{
    if (collision.gameObject.tag == "Player")
    {
        audio.Play();
    }

}

The GameObject which has this script attached has also an audio Source with a 1-2 second audio file.

If the sound plays there is a noticable loading time the first time the sound is loaded. On top of that the framerate drops every other time. Now it sometimes happens that a player collects 2 items in arow, and 2 sounds have to be played. Now it gets really messy. The framerate drop is really big and keeps on untill one of the two sounds stops.

Is there a better way to implement audio, without sacrificing so much performance or do I have to compress the mp3 (or should I use WAV) even more

I'm working with an iPhone 4.

Really appreciate any help.

2

I'm not an experienced Unity/iOS developer, but I have completed and published one iPhone game using Objective C and Cocos2d. If your sound effects are mp3s, that will be a big problem. If I am remembering correctly, there is one hardware processor for decoding these (saves battery over decoding in software), but it can only handle one at a time. I'm guessing Unity is decoding the mp3s in software, which is your performance hit. Make sound effects uncompressed .wavs to avoid this.