[Openal] Status of Linux implementation

[Jason Daly]

Marian Schedenig wrote:
> Well, I've done just that, and I was sorry to find out that it's still unable 
> to play music in stereo. I find this quite disappointing, as I'm now faced 
> with the choice of either sticking to OpenAL for its multichannel support and 
> yet only being able to play music through a single channel, or to switch to 
> some other library (probably SDL) and have multichannel music, but no 
> surround effects. When I first faced this choice some two years or so ago, I 
> was confident the situation was going to change soon... apparently, I was too 
> optimistic.
>   

Yeah, unfortunately it seems for the moment that most of the people who 
care about OpenAL in Linux (like myself) are too busy using it for our 
work to be able to improve it.  We had a pretty good push forward for a 
while, but it seems to have died off for now.

> (Actually, there's a third option... but somehow I don't think playing a music 
> stream through two separate channels separately to manually achieve a stereo 
> effect would be good for the performance?)
>   

I wouldn't count this out as an option before trying it out.  You could 
create two sources, make them AL_SOURCE_RELATIVE, and position them on 
either side of the listener, then do your streaming.  It's kind of 
crude, admittedly, but it should work.

--"J"