[Openal-devel] Help. 5.1 was working, but...

[Chris Robinson]

On Saturday 21 February 2009 3:11:40 pm Scott Mayo wrote:
> Help. Someone - and I think it was someone on this list - gave me an openAL
> .dll with a simple hack added. It checked for environment variable
> ALSOFT_FORMAT being set to AL_FORMAT_51CHN16, and if it was, it let me
> successfully use AL_POSITION to make sounds come from the appropriate
> speakers in a 5.1 channel set up.

That would likely have been me.

> I don't know what changed. I'm pretty certain I didn't mess with the .dll,
> and the env variable is still set, but openAL now confines itself to left
> and right speakers. When I test the sound card with its control and test
> app, I can still get sounds to come from each speaker in turn without
> problem, so it's not the sound card, amps or speakers.

Can you output the name of the opened device, and see what's being opened? And 
the version, as well. IIRC, I added a hack like that for you because the 
Windows version had no way to use a config file to set 5.1 mode, or it was 
automatically overridden with the mode reported by Windows.. one or the other.

This problem should be fixed in OpenAL Soft 1.6, though. You can set a config 
file in %AppData%\alsoft.ini (where %AppData% is the Application Data 
directory for your user) and set a format=AL_FORMAT_51CHN16 line. The 
environment variable ALSOFT_CONF can also be set to a full path+filename that 
will be read similarly. As long as the format option is set to a non-blank 
value, it'll override what Windows says.