An AudioClip represents a segment of audio that can be played
with minimal latency. Clips are loaded similarly to Media
objects but have different behavior, for example, a Media cannot
play itself. AudioClips are also usable immediately. Playback
behavior is fire and forget: once one of the play methods is called the only
operable control is stop(). An AudioClip may also be
played multiple times simultaneously. To accomplish the same task using
Media one would have to create a new MediaPlayer
object for each sound played in parallel. Media objects are
however better suited for long-playing sounds. This is primarily because
AudioClip stores in memory the raw, uncompressed audio data for
the entire sound, which can be quite large for long audio clips. A
MediaPlayer will only have enough decompressed audio data
pre-rolled in memory to play for a short amount of time so it is much more
memory efficient for long clips, especially if they are compressed.
Example usage:
AudioClip plonkSound = new AudioClip("http://somehost/path/plonk.aiff");
plonkSound.play();