Hello,

I am trying to get the position (play time) of a sound currently playing.
I am using SoundEffectInstance for now and could not find something to do this in the help or in the forums.
Basically, I'm looking for something similar to IDirectSoundBuffer8::GetCurrentPosition from DirectSound but for XNA GameStudio.
Is it possible? Is there a workaround to get this value? Using something else than SoundEffectInstance?
Of course, I know I can start a timer when I play the sound, but I want very precise synchronization between sound and the gameplay and need a GetCurrentPosition to recover from lags or anything that could delay the sound. The sound being played can also be quite long.

Thanks for your attention,

Dave.

No dice. There really is not very much in the way of supporting low-level audio in XNA. The best you can get is the visualizer data for a playing music/song instance, and MediaPlayer.PlayPosition, which may or may not very exact (depending on buffering, etc). Also, you have to play data using Song to get to MediaPlayer; SoundEffectInstance doesn't do it.

However: Diagnostics.Stopwatch is very accurate, and the XNA sound system really won't have any sudden lag spikes -- especially on Xbox, where the hardware is 100% known. Thus, you could probably time your playback with a Stopwatch, and it would be good enough for, say, a Guitar Hero type game. Note that the screen only re-paints every 16.7 milliseconds, so anything you display won't have better precision than that anyway.

Thanks for the reply, Jon.

I am a bit surprised but I'll see what I can do.

I am using SoundEffectInstances because I want to be able to play multiple long sounds at the same time. I think you can't with Songs.

Also, will I get better performance using XACT ?

Thanks,

Dave.

jwatte:

No dice. There really is not very much in the way of supporting low-level audio in XNA. The best you can get is the visualizer data for a playing music/song instance, and MediaPlayer.PlayPosition, which may or may not very exact (depending on buffering, etc). Also, you have to play data using Song to get to MediaPlayer; SoundEffectInstance doesn't do it.

However: Diagnostics.Stopwatch is very accurate, and the XNA sound system really won't have any sudden lag spikes -- especially on Xbox, where the hardware is 100% known. Thus, you could probably time your playback with a Stopwatch, and it would be good enough for, say, a Guitar Hero type game. Note that the screen only re-paints every 16.7 milliseconds, so anything you display won't have better precision than that anyway.

Thanks for that info as well JWatte.. after spending way too much time playing I Maed a gam3 with zomb1es.. grrr. friggin addicting thing.. I was kind of wondering how that was done adding the lasers etc right at certain beats in the music..