I have a scenario of problems that I do not know how to resolve or work-around. From my vantage point this is unavoidable but I would like to check and see if I'm missing how to correctly use the sound API.
I have written an adapter ICodec "MPEGCodec" that streams MPEG audio from Internet radio stations. During the ICodec's initialize phase I am initiating the connection and querying the header for meta-data. This always takes a few seconds to complete. If in the main thread I call any of the sound system commands, the thread blocks. I found out that the codec preload thread has the THREAD_SYNC monitor locked and the command functions also wait on this monitor. Since this is my UI thread it effectively freezes the game for a few seconds. So it looks like if I don't want my UI to freeze-up momentarily then I have to avoid calling sound system functions until the stream has finished preloading.
Is there something I am missing? is there a better way to handle this? Should I be using a thread other than the main UI thread for querying the sound system?
