How to properly manage game music and sounds?

Question

I'm developing a WinForms customized version of Pac-Man for a Software Engineering project and I reached the point where I have to implement music and sound effects. I used the MVC architectural pattern, so almost every entity in the game has: a model, a view and a controller (for example, I have a MainMenuModel, a MainMenuView and a MainMenuController).

In order to play music and sounds I decided to use the System.Windows.MediaPlayer class (because the System.Media.SoundPlayer one cannot play two sounds simultaneously). More specifically, I put in every controller the related MediaPlayer objects. So, for example, in the MainMenuController I put: the MenuBackgroundMusicPlayer, the MenuItemSelectionSoundPlayer and the MenuItemOpeningSoundPlayer.

This solution works fine, but I would like to know if it is considered bad design to have multiple instances of MediaPlayer spread all over the controllers, instead of having a single static centralized MediaPlayer instance that handles everything. The problem with having a single instance is that I don't know then how to play two or more sounds simultaneously, because a single MediaPlayer object can handle a single media at a time.

Answer 1

The design pattern of "having a single static centralized instance" is called a "Singleton". See description here

There are some classes from microsoft who are supposed to be used as a singelton for resource and caching reasons. Like HttpClient

For System.Windows.Media.MediaPlayer there seems to be no limitation of this kind. In this case I dont see any reason to use it as a singleton. For a more detailed discussion of the pros and cons of singletons look e.g. here

Its considered bad design to use a singleton without very good reason. This is because singletons are hard to unittest and limit your design possibilities in the future.