[Openal] When to stream?

[Adam D. Moss]

Garin Hiebert wrote:
>> Is there any great reason for this, short of bugs?  I do see
>> the SI AL silently eat the shorter buffers I send it, randomly.
> 
> It would be a bug, since the spec doesn't specify that you can't send  
> things in in very small chunks. 

Right.

 > On the other hand, I don't think
> anyone really expects to be able to stream back 10,000 2-byte buffers  
> in a queue -- it would be just plain weird to ask an OpenAL  
> implementation to do that...

Weird doesn't mean wrong. :)  For example, albeit not queued, a 2-byte
buffer on a looped source is the obvious, naive way to implement a
square-wave voice for a music synthesiser, for example.

> I plan to add a test to the 1.1 suite that will test behavior down to  
> some fairly small limit -- maybe 1024 bytes.

If it's helpful data, the shortest 'real world usage' sample I
use is a 'click' sound at 1212 bytes.  The normal size of a
buffer I use is 4096 bytes (I cache audio in chunks of this size).
At the end of a sound, of course, the last buffer in the queue might
be as small as 2 bytes quite naturally.

--adam
-- 
Adam D. Moss   -   adam at gimp.org