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Since our project included one wave bank and one sound bank, we will need to include a variable to store the information in each of these as well. the variables waveBank and soundBank will keep track of these.

Let's now talk about what these lines of code mean. For starters, you can see that we are simply assigning a value to each of the variables. The waveBank and soundBank variables both also need a reference to their parent audio engine.

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All three of them are also given a string as a parameter. When XNA's Content Pipeline builds your XACT project, it will build a global settings file for the entire project (the .xgs file) and a wave bank file (the .xwb file) for every wave bank you have (only 1 in our case), and a sound bank file (the .xsb file) for every sound bank you have in your project. Each of our components needs to know what file to look in for their information, so we pass "SoundDemoAudio.xgs", "Wave Bank.xwb", and "Sound Bank.xsb" to these. Make sure you give the right path for your files! That is one of the most common problems that arise with playing sound. For example, if you put your .xap project in an "Audio" directory, within the "Content" directory, then you should put "Content/Audio/SoundDemoAudio.xgs".

The XACT Audio Authoring Tool is a companion application used to organize audio assets into wave banks (single files containing multiple WAV files) and sound banks (single files containing instructions for playing the WAV files in wave banks). The wave banks and sound banks for a project are subsequently called by XACT from within the application.

The DirectXTK package also includes a new command-line tool, XWBTool, which can be used to build XACT-style wave banks for more efficient management of audio data. DirectXTK for Audio does not make use of the legacy XACT Engine, XACT Cue, or XACT SoundBank. It only uses .xwb wave banks as a method for packing .wav data. The WaveBank class can use .xwb wave banks built with XWBTool or the legacy XACTBLD tool.

Collection of waves, or sound files, created with XACT (the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool); logically grouped into a single file by an audio designer so it can be integrated into a video game.

XACT supports both in-memory banks (typically used for sound effects) and streaming wave banks (often used for background music). Audio files may be saved in .WAV, .AIFF, XMA, xWMA, and ADPCM formats.

This tutorial covers the basics of the Microsoft Cross-Platform Audio Creation Tool (XACT) API, including understanding XACT components and file formats, and basic steps for using XACT, such as loading wave banks, using notifications, and playing cues.

Wave banks are just bundled wave data, formatted for optimal playback performance. For in-memory wave banks, waves are DWORD aligned. For streamed wave banks, the individual waves are sector aligned (2048-byte boundaries for DVD streaming). All of this data formatting is managed automatically in the XACT build process, based on settings specified by the content author. These settings can be changed easily enough, but you should communicate with your content creator as to what kind of in-memory budget you have for audio, as well as how much streaming bandwidth you can grant to audio during game play.

Sound banks are where waves are assembled on a timeline into sounds by the content creator. The content creator then assigns a cue to play a sound (or in some cases, pick a random sound from a list). The developer then plays and stops these cues based on game events. Beyond controlling cues, the developer can also manipulate some properties on a category level. Each sound can be assigned to a category by the content creator. The developer can then globally adjust the relative volume of categories as well as pause or resume them.

While we're talking about file formats, let's also mention the XACT project file (*.xap). This is the file that contains all of the instructions for building the sound banks and wave banks for a project-every setting that the content creator has specified in the XACT authoring tool. Typically a developer will never have to actually read or edit this file. However, because the sound bank format could change in a future release, you should make sure to rebuild your sound banks with each new SDK, even if the content is no longer being edited. The command line tool xactbld.exe allows you to rebuild sound banks (and, optionally, wave banks) from the XACT project file without needing to open the editing tool. It's quite common to integrate this into a game's automated build process, rather than needing to remember to manually rebuild.

Next, you need to create the wave banks and sound banks. In this tutorial, we only create one XACT wave bank and one XACT sound bank. For more complex games that have lots of sounds, they can break their sound effects into multiple wave and sound banks. This allows them to more easily partition the sound data by level, by character, by material, or however they desire to keep only the working set they desire loaded at the same time.

The most important concept to understand is that you can not free the data block passed to these create functions until XACT has destroyed that wave bank or sound bank. The file data passed to these functions is not cached by XACT and is needed by XACT when sounds are played. Simply calling Release on the bank does not mean the bank is immediately destroyed and the memory can be freed because there could be sound(s) still playing when Release was called.

After the wave and sound banks have been created, an XACT cue index is needed used by your game to play a cue event. There are a few methods for retrieving these index cues. The most common method is to use IXACTSoundBank::GetCueIndex like so:

This notification will trigger whenever any cue stops on any sound bank. If you have multiple sound or wave banks and want to swap them in and out as the game progresses, you can use a notification like this:

To play sounds using XACT, the game plays a specific XACT cue when a game event occurs. This cue is defined in the XACT project by the sound designer to play a certain set of XACT sounds which in turn play events which trigger the playback of a certain set of wave data with possibly a variation of volumes and pitches. Because of the way XACT is designed, the audio that is heard when a cue is played can be changed without recompiling the game. This allows the audio to be designed and tweaked independently once the game events are defined and the cues are triggered by the game engine.

To shut down and clean up XACT, first release all the XACT interfaces and then call IXACTEngine::ShutDown and free the sound and wave bank data like shown below. Be aware that IXACTEngine::ShutDown is synchronous and will take some time to complete if there are still playing cues. Also IXACTEngine::ShutDown is generally only called when a game exits and not the preferred method of changing audio resources. To unload resources while game is running, use notifications. ff782bc1db