This is the first in what I hope will become a series of articles on using Earwax. I plan to keep them relatively short, introducing single concepts, to hopefully introduce ideas slowly and drip feed people information about the libraries features.

The class I want to talk about in this article only got coded today, and it's about the smallest class in Earwax's code base.

The idea behind

BufferDirectory

, is that quite often we need a single directory of sounds we can pick from. This usually leads to code like the following:

room_ambiance = Sound('sounds/ambiances/room.wav')
station_ambiance = Sound('sounds/ambiances/station.wav')
ship_ambiance = Sound('sounds/ambiances/ship.wav')

This is particularly error prone, although has the benefit of letting you autocomplete variable names in your editor of choice.

Inspired by this post, I decided to make a small utility class for the express purpose of loading a directory of sounds. The above code can be rewritten as:

from pathlib import Path

from earwax import BufferDirectory

ambiances: BufferDirectory = BufferDirectory(Path('sounds/ambiances'))

room_ambiance = 'room.wav'
station_ambiance = 'station.wav'
ship_ambiance = 'ship.wav'

Now you can for example get the station ambiance with the below code:

buffer: Buffer = ambiances.buffers[station_ambiance]

This is useful if for example you've moved the entire directory. Instead of performing a find and replace, you can simply change the BufferDirectory instance:

ambiances: BufferDirectory = BufferDirectory(Path('sounds/amb'))

Another common idiom is to select a random sound file from a directory. Earwax has a few sound functions with this capability already. If you pass in a Path instance which is a directory to

play_path

or

play_and_destroy

, then a random file will be selected from the resulting directory.

The BufferDirectory class takes things one step further:

lasers: BufferDirectory = BufferDirectory(Path('sounds/weapons/lasers'))

laser_buffer: Buffer = lasers.random_buffer()

This will get you a random buffer from

lasers.buffers

.

Sometimes you may have other files in a sounds directory in addition to the sound files themselves, attribution information for example. If this is the case, simply pass a

glob

argument when instantiating the class, like so:

bd: BufferDirectory = BufferDirectory(Path('sounds/music'), glob='*.ogg')

In closing, the BufferDirectory class is useful if you have a directory of sound files, that you'll want at some point throughout the lifecycle of your game. Folders of music tracks, footstep sounds, and weapon sounds are just some of the examples that spring to mind.

Hopefully this short article explains how to use the BufferDirectory class. Feel free to ask any questions you may have on the Earwax thread.