Re: Question about OpenAl Versions

On Sunday, November 14, 2010 4:34:49 pm Bruce Clay wrote:
> When I looked through the code in the version before OpenAl soft I notice
> several files that are not in the soft version such as alc_backend_wave and
> al_ext_mp3.  Are there license issues with these files or will they be
> incorporated in a future version?

OpenAL Soft is based on the OpenAL-Windows code base instead of OpenAL-Sample. 
The backends were redone from scratch, and the wave backend is in wave.c. But 
you need to specify the output file, using ~/.alsoftrc or 
/etc/openal/alsoft.conf, to make it work:

[wave]
file = output.wav  # Careful, this will overwrite existing files!

Then it should be enumerated and openable like the rest. Capture from a wave 
file is not supported, though.


As for the MP3/Vorbis extensions, the biggest thing is that they're not very 
practical. Compressed formats (and long sounds in general) are better suited 
to streaming, so loading them fully into a buffer would be wasteful. Also, an 
app couldn't rely on the extensions being available, so it would need a 
fallback method to decode them anyway.

> There are several files in the OpenAL-Sample/test directory that if the
> code is still valid answer a lot of developer questions.  Some of them use
> alut which I could not get to work on Windows 7 but they still seem to
> have a lot of the basic capabilities.

Not all of the tests are still "valid"... many seem to rely on extensions that 
are no longer supported, and are buggy (using wrong orientation values, leaks, 
etc). I have been meaning to write new examples and tests, though.
_______________________________________________
Openal mailing list
[email protected]
http://opensource.creative.com/mailman/listinfo/openal