[Openal] Question about Motu 828mkIII hardware

[Jason Daly]

Chris Robinson wrote:
> If you can, I'd probably try to see if you can use the two cards as a single 
> 7.1 output device, which OpenAL Soft 1.7 can handle without a problem. This 
> shouldn't degrade the quality all much. Though I can see about trying to add 
> 12.2 support to OpenAL Soft if you do want it.
>   

The 828mk3 actually can produce up to 28 channels of I/O.  The WDM 
driver can be set up in either 6.1 or 7.1 mode, so I don't think that's 
the issue.  Most likely, he's looking to have a 6.1 speaker array 
located above the listener, and another 6.1 speaker array below.  
(Please correct me if I'm wrong, Serge).

Assuming I'm right, I'm pretty certain that there's no way for the two 
devices to be combined into a single "virtual" device, at least under 
Windows (ALSA could do it, but MOTU has never been very friendly with 
Linux).

I've always wanted to have an OpenAL implementation that could handle an 
arbitrary number of speakers (via a generic vector-based amplitude 
panning technique), and channelize the data appropriately to any number 
of audio devices.  I don't think it would be *that* hard to do, but I'm 
too lazy to ever go and implement these kinds of things myself  :-)

--"J"