[Openal-devel] mixaudio question

[Ryan C. Gordon]

> etc etc.), though being able to feed Vorbis' native floats
> to AL would be a fine idea (though not something I'd use, for
> other reasons).

   http://icculus.org/alextreg/wiki/AL_EXT_float32

That extension _really_ needs to make it into 1.2...it'd be really good
for Apple, and just generally forward-thinking elsewhere.

> I'm not at all sure that's common behaviour, at least nowadays.
> Framing issues would make that both an inefficient and potentially
> artifacty way of doing it.  I expect that a virtual filesystem like
> PhysicsFS would more be the norm along vaguely similar lines,
> which lets you easily put multiple resources into a single
> physical file but not a single stream - but that's not AL's concern.

For what it's worth, we had an Unreal licensee that tried to convert
_all_ their audio to Ogg Vorbis, and found that short sounds (the
footsteps, gunshots, etc) actually got _larger_ due to the packet format
overhead. Obviously, it was a win for music and, say, character dialog
and lengthier pieces of audio.

I think .ogg actually allows for multiple streams, but I don't think it
would be worth it for packing a bunch of tiny sounds into a single file,
nor do I suspect it would be efficient for random access.

Put all the audio in an uncompressed .zip file if you must have it in
one file, and maybe use something like ADPCM-compressed .wavs for the
shorter sounds.

Not that this helps you in ALUT (except the adpcm part...Steve, do we
have that yet?), but it's probably good advice.

--ryan.