[Openal] Openal, S/PDIF and surround [Almost SOLVED]

[Chris Robinson]

On Wednesday 21 May 2008 01:49:39 pm Alfredo Pironti wrote:
> Unfortunately, I'm using 0.0.8 version (btw, does SI stand for Software
> Implementation?). However, 4 channels for a game are enough (at least
> for me). As far as I can understand, OpenAL Soft is a software
> implementation of the OpenAL API. So, in case I wanted 5.1 audio, should
> I have replaced the OpenAL library that came installed with my
> distribution, with the OpenAL Soft one? Is this enough?

SI stands for Sample Implementation. It's intended to be a portable 
implementation used as a base for most other non-Windows systems. As such, it 
is software based. OpenAL Soft is also intended to be a portable 
implementation with similar goals, however it started off with the cleaner, 
more compliant, old Windows code, and has been working towards supporting all 
the same systems the SI did.

It is generally recommended to use OpenAL Soft in place of the current 0.0.8 
version that is in most distros. However, if your distro doesn't have OpenAL 
Soft (most don't, yet), it may not be too straight forward to replace and 
keep the package manager/dependancies happy.


The main issue is that OpenAL Soft's lib is libopenal.so.1 (which I got from 
the SI's SVN version). However, 0.0.8 uses libopenal.so.0, which is what 
compiled apps expect. Apps that stick to the core OpenAL 1.1 functions (which 
appears to be most/all) shouldn't have an issue with it just being replaced, 
though.

If your package manager lets you name self-provided packages (eg. Gentoo), all 
you need to do is uninstall current OpenAL, tell your package maanger that 
you're providing it yoursekf, install OpenAL Soft, then recompile your apps 
and other libs that use OpenAL (eg. ALUT) so that they look for 
libopenal.so.1 instead of .0.

If it doesn't let you name provided pacakges, what you need to do is install 
OpenAL Soft over top of a current 0.0.8 install, and delete the old libs 
(/usr/lib/libopenal.so.0*). If you're using a source distro, then you should 
just be able to recompile your apps/libs. Otherwise, you'll need to add a 
symlink for libopenal.so.0 pointing to OpenAL Soft's libopenal.so.1.

If you need more instructions, I'll be happy to go into detail. :)


> I documented in a text file the steps I performed in order to have my
> setup working. Nothing extremely difficult, but at least a couple of
> tricks that is worth documenting about. Shall I post documentation on
> this mailing list, or there is a better place where to put documentation?

It may help for future people, and I am a bit interested, so I wouldn't mind 
you posting it here.

> Thank you very much for the support!

No problem. :)