[OpenAL] Status of OpenAL 1.1 on OS X

[Sven Panne]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: George Warner [mailto:geowar at apple.com] 
> Sent: Montag, 21. August 2006 23:52
> To: openal at opensource.creative.com
> Cc: Sven Panne
> Subject: RE: [OpenAL] Status of OpenAL 1.1 on OS X
> 
> On Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:47:22 +0200, "Sven Panne" <Sven.Panne at BenQ.com>
> wrote:
> >> Several Mac OS X OpenAL developers have requested a 
> replacement for 
> >> alutLoadWAVFile (and I needed it for a few of my projects 
> ;-) so... 
> >> [...]
> >
> > http://www.openal.org/openal_webstf/specs/alut.html#Loading :-)The 
> > corresponding LGPL'd code is available e.g. via Subversion at 
> > 
> http://opensource.creative.com/repos/openal/trunk/alut/src/alu
> tLoader.c.
> 
> The problem with that routine is that it only loads WAV 
> files. The alut 1.1 replacement API ( 
> alutCreateBufferFromFile ) is source file agnostic (which is 
> why I chose to implement it instead of the depreciated API).
> [...]

That's not correct: ALUT can already handle various formats, as reported
by alutGetMIMETypes. Currently we support audio/basic, audio/x-raw and
audio/x-wav. There is still a VOC patch lying around somewhere (it has
to be tweaked a bit before merging), and adding OGG support should be
rather easy given libvorbis(file). MP3 seems to be a bit tricky because
of licensing issues, at least unless we have some kind of dynamic
loading/linking.

The situation on Mac OS X is exactly what has been anticipated, i.e. the
underlying platform can load/convert various formats for itself. It
would be good if you could tweak your code into something that can be
merged into ALUT's loaders. The main functions to adapt would be
loadFile and alutGetMIMETypes in
http://opensource.creative.com/repos/openal/trunk/alut/src/alutLoader.c.
Something which could be autoconf'd/#ifdef'd at build time would be
enough, although in the future we might switch to something more fancy
like a plugin concept. I'm busy/away in the next 2 weeks, but after that
I'm happy to merge any new code into the ALUT code base, adding some
autoconf magic if necessary.

Cheers,
   S.