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The traditional method of loading SoundBanks uses SoundBanks that contain a mix of Event data, object structure data, and media. The entire contents of these SoundBanks are loaded and unloaded at particular points in the game to ensure that Event data and related media are ready to be played when triggered.

The following illustration demonstrates how SoundBanks created using the traditional method are loaded and unloaded from platform memory as the player moves from Level 1 to the Level 2 in the game.

Since all the data and media for a particular SoundBank are loaded into memory at the same time, this method not only ensures that all data and media are ready to play when required, but it performs very little disk seeking during gameplay, which frees up the disk for other disk intensive tasks.

The main drawback with this method is that a substantial amount of memory is taken for the entire time that the SoundBanks are loaded, which gives you less flexibility when dealing with large, sophisticated games. This method also explicitly loads all the content within a SoundBank without verifying to see if media files are already loaded into memory. This may cause the same media file to be loaded into memory more than once. Despite these drawbacks, the traditional method can still be useful in many situations. For example, in a typical pinball game, where all data and media must be available at all times.