[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 15 ■ Implementing Game Audio Assets: Using the JavaFX AudioClip Class Audio Sequencing Engine
Creating and Optimizing Digital Audio: Audacity 2.0.6
Launch the latest version of Audacity—at the time of this writing that would be 2.0.6, and use your microphone to
record your voice saying the word “left.” Fortunately my NetBeans 8 and Java 8 development workstation is also my
Skype workstation, and I have a basic Logitech adjustable microphone on a stand that I can use to make the basic
audio files that we will need to put audio files into place for each of our different sprite movements that we put into
place in Chapter 13. I will go through the digital audio file “scratch creation” and optimization work process in this
section of the chapter, and you can do this yourself, for each of the six digital audio files we will need to use in the
coding sections of this chapter. You can also use the six audio files included with this book’s software repository if you
want to simply get onto the Java 8 coding part of digital audio asset implementation using the JavaFX AudioClip class.
I would recommend going over how to optimize uncompressed audio for use in system memory, as we’re about to
take 113KB of raw source audio data, and knock 99KB of data off of it, and reduce it another 88% to be only 14KB.
As you can see in the left side of Figure 15-1, I have recorded the spoken word “left,” and used the Audacity
selection tool to select only that portion of the recording session, seen in a darker gray shade, that contains the audio
data. Since you can see the digital audio waveform representation in the Audacity waveform editing area, you can see
the portion of your recording where the data that you just recorded is contained. The portion of your audio recording
that does not contain any digital audio data will just look like a straight line.
Figure 15-1. Launch Audacity, record your voice saying the word “left,” and then select the wave and Export Selection
The fastest way to get only the raw digital audio data, which is all that we really want inside of our .WAV file
anyway, and is the only data that we want to be optimizing using Audacity, is to use the File ➤ Export Selection menu
sequence. This will allow us to directly write the selected audio data into the left.wav file using the WAVE PCM digital
audio format. After we do this, we can then start a new Audacity editing session and simply open up that file and start
the digital audio content optimization process.
After you use the Export Selection menu option in Audacity, you will get the Export File dialog, which is shown
in Figure 15-2. Type left in the File name: field, seen in the bottom of the dialog, and click the Save button.
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