What does Play from Disk do? I get terrible performance

[Outcast]

I have been doing some performance tests and one thing I noticed was that when I have a sound that always play and I check in "play from disk" in the data elements section for the sample I get about 1/4 the performance. (So if I have 40fps normally I only get about 10fps with this checked)

But I have seen people using play from disk, so I wonder what does it do and how is it useful?

[King_Cool]

As i understand it makes sure the Sample allways plays ( as sometimes samples dont allways play for some reason in Android ), but this come as a cost of major ingame loading/ pause/ lag on my end as well.
Not sure what the actuall intention of the setting is, but maybe the documentation description could cast some light?

[Simon]

It plays the file straight from the disk/storage, rather than loading it into memory and playing from there. I think this is intended for medium to large sized files in low memory/resource environments, such as mobiles. Using it will cause repeated access to the file system to stream data to play, so performance will be low. You have to pick your moments to use this feature, in the middle of a heavy action game or cutscene for example is probably not one of them.

[King_Cool]

Just wanted to uppdate on the issue of audio not playing on specific Devices ( i mentione this above, and have mentioned this other places ).
The new Android Beta fixed these issues

[Fernando]

Play from disk does as is mentioned.

get the sound, load from disk, and play, this is done every time since is not good practice to keep the media player busy for other Application.

that's why it take more time.

btw if you use .ogg with high bitrate it take more time to expand and to be ready to play

[Astronio]

Hi Fernando, when I play from Disk on the LG G Pad 8.3 the sounds are much louder. For example, if music plays from disk and sound effects play from memory then the music is going to be much-much louder than the sound effects.
One could argue that I could simply lower the volume of the music. However, on my other device (Samsung S4 mini) there is no volume difference when I play from disk compared to when I play from memory (it works fine).
Is there a workaround for this problem? How do I make all sounds play at the same level on all devices?

[Fernando]

Good example, as always explain in each device media player work totally different, this is a hardware matter.

Did you try to read master volume first and adjust accordingly?

[Astronio]

Can you give me an example of what you mean by reading master volume?

[Fernando]

try this example, see always conditions

also it show how to change master volume using keys, this si the same result as set main volume though.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...ject%20Key.mfa