Synchronizing sound and image for splash screen.

Question

Hello all,
I have a peculiar request. ...
I have a sound file (about 137KB) and an animated gif (about 134KB).
I would like to use this as my splash window before my app starts up.
I know how to load these 2 to a screen but my problem is how do I synchronize the sound to go along with the image when it starts up? (Its a gunshot sound, whcih is looped with the animated image showing the bullet holes ;-)
I've been investigating using the Timer class but no success to date.
Currently, the sound file loads up, starts and then a few seconds later the image..
So.... How do I:
1. Load the sound first.
2. Load the image.
3. Start both of them synchronized.

Answer 1

This is actually pretty involved...
Are you using java.applet.AudioClip to play the sound? Are you loading the animated gif as a JLabel or something using ImageIcon?
If you are using AudioClip for the audio, I suggest that you cache the sound and image before playing the sound... otherwise you'll probably hear pops or the sound will pause. To cache the sound, do this:
AudioClip clip = Applet.newAudioClip("somefile");
Unfortunately, java really sucks at handling animated gifs. On slower computers, I've seen it take about 15-20 seconds to load an animated gif that's around 90k in size... totally unacceptable! If you have a gif that just plays a once (or a few times) and then stops, you'll have to flush the graphic to restart the image. This will reload the file and cause the long delay every time you need to replay the gif.
It seems like the best thing to do is to break up the animated gif into frames (either put each frame in its own file, or place each frame into one large image file and use clip rectangles to retrieve frames) and handle the animation yourself with your own thread. Alternatively, you can use the GifDecoder utility available at http://www.fmsware.com/stuff/gif.html, but be careful when using GifDecoder, it eats up a lot of memory for larger Gif files. When you handle the animation yourself, things should work properly. Again, make sure to cache the images by doing something like:
ImageIcon ii = new ImageIcon("somefile");
Once everything is preloaded, things should be pretty much synchronized if you play the sound and then show the image.
To have more control, you may have to use an object with synchronized methods... like if you want a sound to play on the 3rd and 10th frame of animation. Another option is to use Quicktime for Java.
If you need more info, let me know!