The pygame.mixer
module helps control the music used in pygame
programs. As of now, there are 15 different functions for the mixer
module.
Similar to how you have to initialize pygame
with pygame.init()
, you must initialize pygame.mixer
as well.
By using the first option, we initialize the module using the default values. You can though, override these default options. By using the second option, we can initialize the module using the values we manually put in ourselves. Standard values:
pygame.mixer.init(frequency=22050, size=-16, channels=2, buffer=4096)
To check whether we have initialized it or not, we can use pygame.mixer.get_init()
, which returns True
if it is and False
if it is not. To quit/undo the initializing, simply use pygame.mixer.quit()
. If you want to continue playing sounds with the module, you might have to reinitialize the module.
As your sound is playing, you can pause it tempoparily with pygame.mixer.pause()
. To resume playing your sounds, simply use pygame.mixer.unpause()
. You can also fadeout the end of the sound by using pygame.mixer.fadeout()
. It takes an argument, which is the number of milliseconds it takes to finish fading out the music.
You can play as many songs as needed as long there are enough open channels to support them. By default, there are 8 channels. To change the number of channels there are, use pygame.mixer.set_num_channels()
. The argument is a non-negative integer. If the number of channels are decreased, any sounds playing on the removed channels will immediately stop.
To find how many channels are currently being used, call pygame.mixer.get_channels(count)
. The output is the number of channels that are not currently open. You can also reserve channels for sounds that must be played by using pygame.mixer.set_reserved(count)
. The argument is also a non-negative integer. Any sounds playing on the newly reserved channels will not be stopped.
You can also find out which channel isn't being used by using pygame.mixer.find_channel(force)
. Its argument is a bool: either True or False. If there are no channels that are idle and force
is False, it will return None
. If force
is true, it will return the channel that has been playing for the longest time.