[Openal-devel] oal-soft

[Chris Robinson]

On Monday 18 February 2008 03:14:15 am Xavier Bouchoux wrote:
> hi,
>
> I did a little try using open-al soft (latest from git) together with
> the creative router and implementations.
>
> I changed the dll name to "test-soft_oal.dll", and put it next to the exe.
> It got discovered and worked perfectly!
>
> A few issues though:
>   - the EFX implementation doesn't work very well (I mean it doesn't
> crash, it does kind of work for some settings, but for other settings it
> just makes "scritches" and metallic noises.)

Which settings? Reattaching the effect to the effect slot causes a 
reallocation of the reverb buffer, which could introduce a quick scritch-like 
noise in a currently-reverberating sound. This could be improved some.

> the 5.1 surround works, but I'm being told that:
> - rear and front are inverted
> - so the center channel doesn't work as the channels are inverted

How do you mean inverted? Front is rear and rear is front? Or left/center is 
right/lfe and right/lfe is left/center? Or both? Windows is pretty explicit 
about the channel order, so if the output channels are mixed up, I'd think 
you either have very buggy drivers or have the speakers hooked up wrong.. the 
latter being quite annoying, especially when they color-code the jacks on the 
sound card, and use different-but-similar colors on the plugs (argh!).

Like on one of the systems here, I have to plug the black plug into, not the 
black jack which is clearly there, but the gray jack. Also the pinkish plug 
has to go into the orange jack, not the pink jack. However on another system 
with the same speakers, the plug colors match perfectly to the jacks.

Though now that I think about it, I do get some weird surround-sound anomolies 
in some games, while I'm quite sure the speaker-position test in one of the 
control panel applets works perfectly...

> - there's a little delay in the sounds, approximateley 0.5sec of lag.
> (that is between vision and sound, that is not present with other
> implementations)

The default buffer is 8192 frames. For 44.1khz playback, the default, that's 
0.185759637 seconds (a bit long, but generally a fair compromise for slower 
CPUs I think, and much less than half of a second).

> I'll try to investigate a bit more when I have some spare time.

I look forward to hearing back. :)