[Openal] No voices?

[Adam D. Moss]

Tristan Grimmer wrote:
> I suppose my question is: why is it the way that it is?

 From what I can gather from historical chatter and jv, it was
originally meant to be roughly as you describe - sources are
things in the world which emit sound, and voices are an
implementation detail which the AL implementation juggles
to accommodate the most appropriate sources at any given
moment.

In practice, the Linux/sample implementation, being a software
mixer, has no intrinsic voice limit (mixing precision issues
aside) and just lets you allocate and use an indefinite number of
sources without the implementation having to do any clever juggling
- it just goes ahead and mixes every single active source.

When AL was less well specified and still in significant flux,
Creative was also working on their semi-fork and (a Creative
bod can probably correct me if it's at all interesting)
either didn't understand the point of infinite sources or
(more likely) didn't want the complexity of the dynamic voice
management that would be necessary for their hardware
implementation - so the spec got retrofixed.

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