Q:

ActionScript 3 - Sound File Vs. Programmatically Created Sound

For basic sounds, such as sine waves or white noise, which is considered less processor intensive:  looping an .mp3 file or programmatically creating the sound?
My first though was that looping an .mp3 must be less involved than programming a sound, but after reading the documentation and considering the primitive nature of these sounds i'm not so sure.
Any thoughts?

A:

The number of CPU instructions per uncompressed sound sample is usually far less for decoding an mp3 than for algorithmically generating samples for most sounds more interesting than a square wave, especially if the actionscript interpreter and floating point math gets involved.

