Easy-to-Use Audio for Basically Every Situation in Godot 4 

It feels like most people just *assume* Godot is missing a ton of key functionality when it's totally available. Most times someone asks me for a function/class that does some behavior, there's already something built-in that does exactly that and more. Tweens are a fantastic example. Excellent way to time sequential events with minimal code and it can be done from anywhere with minimal setup.

There's definitely going to be a hit and realistically pooling Players (and Nodes in general) is definitely a go-to optimization, but I haven't benchmarked anything. I actually wrote a benchmarking tool just after this, but then got busy with other things before I could actually properly test it; search the asset library for "ScriptBench" and you should find it. That being said, something I didn't originally make clear is that this isn't intended to be a universally loved library or tool that every project should use, it's intended to help people get their foot in the door of audio programming ASAP. People get intimidated by "intro tutorials" that are multiple hours long, so I wanted to provide a small abstraction that fills a lot of the holes a beginner will run into with audio in Godot. Realistically, if you want *really* good audio, you should either roll your own system or go with FMOD.

Audio is inherently difficult due to how optimized it needs to be. People tend to focus on graphical optimization since "we need to render 60 frames per second!" but that also gets it's own whole piece of compute hardware in a dedicated GPU while audio needs to render 44k samples per second *minimum* for decent results and usually that needs to be accomplished via a single software thread (which might be kicked off the core via the OS or hardware, leading to an unpredictable and unavoidable performance hit. Because of these factors, audio programming kind of needs to be focused on speed optimization above all else in every aspect which tends to create "unintuitive" or "overcomplicated" solutions to seemingly simple problems. That being said, part of why I made this video was to show that playing a single sound effect on command *isn't* complicated. It's only a few lines of code: make the sound player, assign the sound resource, add the player to the scene tree, and tell it to start playing. If you know a Node will always be a sound source for a particular sound, you could also just set up the SoundPlayer as a child and call `SoundPlayer[XD].play()`; polyphony is free as of Godot 4.