I'm making a game (In java) with a lot of audio and music in it, but the music files are pretty big and high quality so they are taking up a lot of memory. It works fine when I run it, but if i complete level and come to the next one then the music from the first level will music.stop() and the music from the second level will level2.start(). I can only do this by completing 3 levels and then the game crashes and I get the message:

Exception in thread "AWT-EventQueue-0" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space
at com.sun.media.sound.JavaSoundAudioClip.readStream(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.media.sound.JavaSoundAudioClip.loadAudioData(Unknown Source)
at com.sun.media.sound.JavaSoundAudioClip.<init>(Unknown Source)
at sun.applet.AppletAudioClip.createAppletAudioClip(Unknown Source)
at sun.applet.AppletAudioClip.<init>(Unknown Source)
at java.applet.Applet.newAudioClip(Unknown Source)
at Game2.<init>(Game2.java:303)
at Map$1.keyPressed(Map.java:205)
.....blabla bla bla bla

I tried to remove the music files by changing the path to the music to the wrong way so the game couldn't find the music and then it worked. Can you somehow empty the memory usage from the last level and refresh it on my new level so that I don't have to care?

I'm unfamiliar with JavaSoundAudioClip but a quick look at the documentation did not suggest it holds any native resources that must be explicitly released. From your description you appear to be keeping all resources of previous levels around. Normally the VM would be able to free the memory itself but if you never allow anything to become unreachable, that is not possible.

Assuming your resources all reside in the Level instances, a quick fix would be to set level1 to null when you move over to level2, and so on. Of course a much cleaner solution would be a data-driven design where only one instance of Level is active and a new one is filled with data for the new level as needed.

You could also run a profiler and see what is the usage profile of the heap, and see if you can pinpoint where the game is leaking memory.

Hmm, I think that when I use the music.stop() method, the music is still in the memory and it is just waiting for me to use music.play() again. There are no function that does music.terminate() or something. But maybe I can set music = null or something. I will try that.

EDIT: Yes it worked to set all the sounds to null at the same place where I remove all the frames and content and stuff. Thanks