Rust Programming

In this case, I don't think Sink will let you selectively remove sources (although you can clear the sink if you want), but whenever you want to play a click you could clear the sink and append the clicking source to it. Alternatively, you could create a source that chains the clicking sound with something like Zero and have it repeat indefinitely, but have the Zero source play until you receive a new signal to play the click audio (and stop the source once you're done clicking).

I think how you should approach this depends on your architecture, so I'll give a couple approaches I would consider if I were trying to do this myself:

1. For a blocking approach: I'd play the click sound once (using .append on the sink, for example), then use Instant::now() - last_instant and pass whatever duration is left to wait off to thread::sleep. This would look something like this (pseudo-ish code):

   let mut audio_started = Instant::now();
   for _click_idx in 0..num_clicks {
       sink.append(click_sound.clone()); // you can buffer the click_sound source and clone the buffer using .buffered() if needed
       let remaining = Instant::now() - audio_started;
       if remaining > Duration::ZERO {
           std::thread::sleep(remaining);
       }
   }
   

2. For a non-blocking approach where you have a separate thread managing the audio, I'd use a channel or similar as a signal for when to play the click. Your thread could then wait until that signal is received and append the click sound to the sink. You'd basically have a thread dedicated to managing the audio in this case. If you want a more complicated version this as an example, here's a project where we used rodio with tauri (like you) to queue up audio sources to be played on demand whenever the user clicks certain buttons in the UI. The general architecture is the same - just a for loop listening for events from a channel, and then using those events to add sources to our output stream (though you can just use a Sink I believe to keep things simple).