Could setting ByteArrayInputStream as InputStream deteriorate sound quality?

[john price]

The music is sent through a server. The music is received by a client. When all the music has been received, it sends it in a byte array (byte[]) to the following method :

public void playSound(byte[] songsToPlay) {
	try {
	InputStream listen = new ByteArrayInputStream(songsToPlay);
	AudioInputStream sound = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(listen);
    // load the sound into memory (a Clip)
    DataLine.Info info = new DataLine.Info(Clip.class, sound.getFormat());
    clip1 = (Clip) AudioSystem.getLine(info);
    clip1.open(sound);
	clip1.addLineListener(new LineListener() {
      public void update(LineEvent event) {
        if (event.getType() == LineEvent.Type.STOP) {
          event.getLine().close();
        }
      }
    });
    // play the sound clip
	clip1.start();
  }
  catch (Exception e) {
  e.printStackTrace();
  }
  }

Could the following line deteriorate the sound?

InputStream listen = new ByteArrayInputStream(songsToPlay);

I am asking this because when it is sent through the server to the client and played, it has bad quality to the sound. I have posted this in different forums on Coderanch (one I believe, possible two). The difference is that this is asking a different question (about the ByteArrayInputStream). I am just trying to cover all my bases and figure out why the sound is so bad. I felt this belonged here because this is about sampled audio specifics.

[Tina Smith]

What sound format is the sound in originally?

Just to give an example, a WAV file (raw audio) has each sound sample encoded as a signed short (16 bit integer). The value of the sample is dependent on the volume of the sound at that point in time. I could see sound getting messed up if someone were to try to play each sample of sound as two samples (i.e. encode a wav file in an array of bytes). (I've never actually tried to do this, so I don't know what it would sound like.)

Have you tried writing the byte stream out to file and playing it with a media player? That should help you isolate the problem, whether the songsToPlay variable contains bad data, or if, as you suppose, the ByteArrayInputStream is somehow at fault here.

[john price]

Thank you for your suggestion. This is what I put in my code :

//playSound(newSounds);
			FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream("C://Users//cc11rocks//Desktop//TestSong.au");
			fos.write(newSounds);
			fos.close();
			reRoute();

reRoute method :

private void reRoute() {
  try {
  AudioInputStream audio = AudioSystem.getAudioInputStream(new File("C://Users//cc11rocks//Desktop//TestSong.au"));
  DataLine.Info info = new DataLine.Info(Clip.class, audio.getFormat());
    Clip clip = (Clip) AudioSystem.getLine(info);
    clip.open(audio);
	clip.addLineListener(new LineListener() {
      public void update(LineEvent event) {
        if (event.getType() == LineEvent.Type.STOP) {
          event.getLine().close();
        }
      }
    });
    // play the sound clip
	clip.start();
	}
	catch (Exception efafa) {efafa.printStackTrace();}
  }

I tried it and it still sounded really bad. It's not with reading it. It's with the network transfer. Thanks for you suggestion. I can now cross this off the list.

EDIT : I just thought, I'm saving the incoming bytes in a StringBuilder. Maybe that is the issue. I'm going to make a new post in the I/O section about StringBuilder to Bytes. Hopefully, that will be the problem and I will somehow be able to fix it.

Thanks again for your help,
John Price