AVFoundation.AVAudioPlayer stops randomly - ios

Question

I'm trying to play multiple sounds at the same time. However sometimes the sounds just stops playing or never starts at all.
I have an eventhandler that recieves an event when a sound effect should be played:
void HandlePlaySound (object sender, EventArgs e)
{
this.InvokeOnMainThread (()=>{
...
[set url to path]
...
MonoTouch.AVFoundation.AVAudioPlayer player = MonoTouch.AVFoundation.AVAudioPlayer.FromUrl(url);
player.Play();
});
}
This works fine most of the time but when two sounds gets triggered at the same time it's seems like one of them will be killed or both. I must be doing something really wrong here.
Is there a more correct way of playing sounds in an iPhone app. Each sound is supposed to play till end and there could be multiple sounds playing at the same time.

Answer 1

If I were to guess, I'd say that sometimes, the GC comes in and disposes the player that has gone out of scope, causing your random stop behaviour. I found a stable solution being first establishing how many simultaneous audio streams you'd like to able to play, and then enforcing those rules:
// I'd like a maximum of 5 simultaneous audio streams
Queue<AVAudioPlayer> players = new Queue<AVAudioPlayer>(5);
void PlayAudio (string fileName)
{
NSUrl url = NSUrl.FromFilename(fileName);
AVAudioPlayer player = AVAudioPlayer.FromUrl(url);
if (players.Count == 5) {
players.Dequeue().Dispose();
}
players.Enqueue(player);
player.Play();
}
// In my example, I'll select files from my Sounds folder (containing a couple of .wav, a couple of .mp3 and an .aif)
string[] files;
int fileIndex = 0;
string GetNextFileName ()
{
if (files == null)
files = Directory.GetFiles("Sounds");
if (fileIndex == files.Length)
fileIndex = 0;
return files[fileIndex++];
}
partial void OnPlayButtonTapped (NSObject sender)
{
string fileName = GetNextFileName();
PlayAudio(fileName);
}