Music and Sound folder question

Hi guys, I was really wondering about the music and sound folder.

We have two separate folders for all audio. Music and Sound folder. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but these are what I understand:

1: Sound folder is completely downloaded to the player side (is it because it is usually smaller in size?), whereas the Music folder is streamed only when it is played (larger size?).

2: There are audio limitations in mobile games. Sound effects (sound folder I presume) works fine, but musics (music folder?) has a problem in that it doesn't work on the start of layout event. It requires a player to initiate a touch before it plays.

Based on those two, would this be a correct?

1: So it looks like the sound folder and music folder are specially for games that are hosted on a server and require constant Internet connection to play, like on Scirra's Arcade, since they are partially downloaded and streamed.

2: But for mobile games, that isn't the case since the player needs to download everything to play the game even if he is offline.

So am I correct to come to the conclusion that since the Music folder for mobile games require player activity to start, is it not better if we placed all audio, even the music in the sound folder since it doesn't share the same problem as the music folder? Or am I missing something?

Music needs to go into Music folder because of the streaming, if you place it in Sounds, it will try to load entire file and then play, which would cause a big delay. Whereas Music will start streaming and play with about 1s delay only (close to 0 on newer devices).

—, thanks for that. So does that mean that streaming in this case, doesn't mean online streaming? But refers to whether the game will actually load to memory?

Haha sorry if my question is quite noob, as I really am a bit clueless in this aspect.

—, thanks for that. So does that mean that streaming in this case, doesn't mean online streaming? But refers to whether the game will actually load to memory?

Haha sorry if my question is quite noob, as I really am a bit clueless in this aspect.

Streaming in this case is loading the music file (.ogg or .mp4) into memory and playing it. As music is not automatically loaded into memory unless its called.

On older devices, its highly recommended to do a Preload first, then wait ~2s before playing to ensure the file plays correctly (as it takes time to read and load into memory). I found my older phones would not play a bigger track without that preload time.

—, thank you for clearing that up. It makes sense to me now. But how do you preload music? I didn't notice this in the tutorials that I've viewed.

blackhornet, thanks for that! Haha now to test it out on a few different spec phones to see if I should preload my music or not. Again, thanks guys!