Swing Hacks

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Chapter 10, Audio

#72 Play a Sound with Java Media Framework

HACK

The downside to JavaSound is the small number of supported formats. Java-

Sound, at least out of the box, isn’t well suited to handle having random

sound formats thrown at it. That’s not a problem if you’re supplying your

own sounds for your application—just stick with AIFF or WAV. But it does

make JavaSound less than useful in a media browser or some other applica-

tion that is going to have to deal with random formats encountered on the

Net or the user’s local storage. Of course, that’s part of the idea of the

spi

sub-package: Sun provides the framework, and third parties make their for-

mats available to Java by implementing

spi interfaces.

H A C K

#72

Play a Sound with Java Media Framework Hack #72

Use the Java Media Framework for better performance and support for more

audio formats.

Java Media Framework (JMF) is Sun’s attempt to bring a broadly focused

multimedia framework to Java, supporting audio, video, and other time-

based media types. The idea is to provide Java desktop applications with

these features across operating systems. Like JavaSound, it’s meant to be

extended so that Sun or third parties could add support for new file formats

or codecs (the compression/decompression encoding schemes used inside

those files).

JMF offers another way to provide sound from an application. The advan-

tages of doing so are that JMF may provide access to many more sound files

than JavaSound will alone, and that JMF is somewhat easier to code than

JavaSound, particularly for simple tasks. The disadvantages are that JMF

capabilities vary wildly by platform, and that the end user will have to install

JMF separately, which will be difficult or simply not allowed for some users.

Installing JMF

Download and install JMF from its home page at http://java.sun.com/

products/java-media/jmf/index.jsp and you should be ready to go—no reboot

required. The installers should have put everything into the correct path and

set up your environment. If you have trouble getting JMF programs to run,

or if you used the all-Java version that doesn’t have a special installer, you

can try adding the following environment variable:

JMFHOME="C:\Program Files\JMF2.1.1"

Next, add the two JMF Java libraries to your classpath:

CLASSPATH="$JMFHOME\lib\jmf.jar;$JMFHOME\lib\sound.jar;.;$CLASSPATH"

PATH="$JMFHOME\lib;$PATH"