Playing sounds Async from memory with high performance

[Diamonddrake]

Just because I was bored one day I looked on the net for an app that would let me use my RockBand ps3 drum kit on the PC. There was a fancy direct X app out that turned out to be very buggy, slow, and annoying to use.

I set out to write my own and within 40 minutes I had a simple working system. But I ran into a problem with sound quality and speed. I need to be able to load the sound clips into memory, so not to read the files from the disk a million times. But then be able to play the sounds whenever I need them Asynchronously, and be able to play the same sound overlapping its self.

i tried using winmm.dll, and the soundplayer, and even Irklang sound engine. Irklang worked great except it only plays from a filepath, not memory, so i ran performance issues. serious ones. the other methods, although I can play from memory, don't allow the Asynchronously rapid play behavior I need.

This isn't a "serious" project. Just something i want to do. Any help with this would be appreciated. Sound is a new frontier in programming for me. Never been there and don't know what supplies I should bring with me.

[kvprajapati]

A very good book to read - High performance memory systems.

[Diamonddrake]

google books would only let me read some pages, I am actually more concerned with ways to play sounds vs manage memory. Although it did look interesting.

[Diamonddrake]

found a temporary solution My snippet But i think i may use irrKlang sound engine. i found that you can play sounds from memory using its Sound object interface.

Still undecided, but i did find enough information to feed my needs.