Expo-AV not playing audio after a while, and how to fix it

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Expo-AV not playing audio after a while, and how to fix it

08/28/2024 08:36, 1 year ago

Recently, I was working on my game AI Against Humanity, where I encountered a bug in Expo-AV.
Namely, I was trying to play sounds.
And while it at first worked fine, after playing sounds for a few minutes, eventually I would run into this issue:

Unhandled Promise Rejection
"Player doesn't exist" or sometimes "Player not found"

This was due to a memory leak in my application.
When you load sounds with await Audio.Sound.createAsync(source), it doesn't automatically unload it.

So I just wrote a custom hook, useSoundEffect, that you can use out of the box in your Expo app as well.
Here it is:

// useSoundEffect.ts
import { Audio } from "expo-av"
import { useEffect, useState } from "react"

function useSoundEffect(source: any) {
  const [sound, setSound] = useState<Audio.Sound>(null)

  useEffect(() => {
    let _sound: Audio.SoundObject = null
    const loadSound = async () => {
      _sound = await Audio.Sound.createAsync(source)
      setSound(_sound.sound)
    }
    loadSound()

    return () => {
      _sound?.sound?.unloadAsync()
    } 
  }, [])

  return sound
}

export default useSoundEffect

It's supposed to be used like this:

// First I add a Typescript definition to import .mp3 files
// If you want to be fancy, you can always specify a type for any
// I just went the quick way to get it working
declare module "*.mp3" {
  const value: any;
  export default value;
}

// Then somewhere in the code, I can import the sound
import SoundFanfare from '@page/against-humanity/sounds/fanfare.mp3'

// And then, in any component, you can just use the hook like so
const soundFanfare = useSoundEffect(SoundFanfare)

// Then at any time, you can play the sound
const playSound = () => {
  soundFanfare.playAsync()
}

// And you don't even have to worry about the unloading <3

That's about it for now, I'll see you soon
With love from wituz

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Replies

(1/1) 11/07/2025 17:36, anonymous user wrote

if someone lands here trying to debug your mp3 not working in expo, my problem was that the file was .MP3 and not .mp3 thanks for your guide !