There is a really cool audio "toy" called ToneMatrix. I would like to reimplement it as a Java applet. I've tried using JFugue's player.play with individual notes for sound and Thread.sleep for timing, but the results are horrible.
JFugue stops responding after the 17th (yes, really, I counted) invocation of player.play and Thread.sleep is too irregular to deliver a good rhythm.
What would you recommend instead? Basically, I'm looking for a simple way to generate single notes of sound on the fly. So a fraction of a second before the sound is due to play, I need to be able to look at the data and tell the audio library what notes to play. (Multiple notes in harmony are likely.)
My guess is you're forgetting to turn the notes off in JFugue, or there's a bug which is forgetting to stop playing the notes once started.
Using MIDI is a pretty easy way to do what you're talking about. Here's a bit of a hodgepodge of useful methods in the midi package that will get you started:
Synthesizer synth = MidiSystem.getSynthesizer();
synth.open();
MidiChannel midiChannel = synth.getChannels()[0];
midiChannel.allNotesOff();
currentInstrument = synth.getAvailableInstruments()[index];
System.out.println("Switching instrument to #" + index + ": " + currentInstrument.getName());
synth.loadInstrument(currentInstrument);
midiChannel.programChange(currentInstrument.getPatch().getBank(), currentInstrument.getPatch().getProgram());
midiChannel.noteOn(noteNumber, velocity);
midiChannel.noteOff(noteNumber);