[Openal] How to really reserve sources

[Sergio Rodríguez]

Hello,
For a game I'm developing, I'd like to reserve a fixed amount of sources and
be sure they all are available during application execution, so I can leave
the management of the voices to an upper layer. I'm using an X-Fi, and the
available number of voices (127 at first) are diminished as other
applications are playing sounds.

I've tried to reserve 64 channels using alGenSources(64, &mSources[0]), but
this doesn't really allocate the channels, only the names (as documented in
OpenAL 1.1 specificacion), so nothing is really reserved and 127 voices are
again available to other applications. The only way to have the sources
really reserved is using it, so my question is if there is other way to
effectively reserve the sources for the app. Maybe playing them with an
empty buffer while they are not needed? I have not tried this yet, as I feel
it could be unsupported on some implementations.

Any suggestion greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.

Sergio.
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