[Openal] 24Bit Audio Support

[jammer at jammer.biz]

Hi All,

Just a quick introduction (I should apologise first in case my subject
line is a question that comes up a lot in here ... sorry if it does) The
name is jammer, musician, studio owner and software developer.  However
this is the first time I've gotten my hands dirty with audio development. 
I think I avoided it for long enough with full knowledge of just how many
pitfalls there potentially are.

Anyway, I've been looking at every solution I could find and it seems
(strangely) that most platforms just don't support 24Bit audio ... period.
 Ideally I'd like to be able to support audio at rates of upto 24Bit
192Khz in my app.  That's probably asking a lot of an open source library
but just finding one that supports 24Bit at all has so far proved very
difficult.

I'm writing the app in C# on the Windows .NET framework and have already
found the SDL library and have now found the TAO Framework which looks to
be an amazing library.  I just hope openAL works with 24Bit audio streams.
 As for performance and things like that my app is not going to be running
multiple streams of audio and it certainly won't require the kinds of
operations on audio that a game would require.  I just need simple stereo
audio capabilities in 24Bit.

I have been playing around with Managed DirectX but have so far failed to
get this working with 24Bit audio files (16Bit works fine) and as I
understand it Managed DirectX is sort of on the way out in favour of XACT
anyway, I'm wibbling now.  If anyone can advise on this 24Bit issue I
would appreciate it a lot.  Looking through the documentation I couldn't
see any references to the supported audio formats or specifically support
for 24Bit audio streams.

Thanks for any replies, good to 'meet' you all.

Jammer