[Openal] ***SPAM*** alutLoadMemoryFromFileImage

[Sven Panne]

On Sunday 02 September 2007 11:07, developer at oldunreal.com wrote:
> It simply says:
> alutLoadMemoryFromFileImage tries to guess the sound data format by
> looking at the contents of the memory region given as the first two
> arguments

When writing the spec, we were intentionally vague about supported formats. 
The reason for this is that not the spec itself should restrict the kind of 
supported formats, but the implementation. The ALUT API is flexible enough 
for this, the only thing lacking is some kind of streaming support (we 
couldn't agree on a sensible API for this, IIRC, but new suggestions would be 
appreciated).

The freealut implementation has a fixed set of supported formats, because I 
never got enough time and energy to implement some kind of plugin concept, 
where new formats could even be deployed after freealut's installation via a 
DLL/*.so. Nevertheless, the code is structured in a way that this should be 
easy, the only tricky part is implementing dynamic loading in portable way 
(doable, but quite hairy). If somebody feels inclined to add this to 
freealut, I'd be quite happy.

> But what formats are actually really supported? Didn't find a list
> somewhere.

You can use alutGetMIMETypes at runtime:

   http://openal.org/openal_webstf/specs/alut.html#alutGetMIMETypes

Cheers,
   S.