[Openal] m-audio quatro and openAL

[Jason Daly]

Yvan Vander Sanden wrote:
> I'm using Windows Vista. The Windows XP drivers from M-Audio work on
> vista for all applications like Sonar and Pure Data, so that should
> not be a problem. As of this morning, I've convinced myself to by a
> buy a SB X-Fi titanium from a local store and it seems to work pretty
> well. I am a bit anxious about latency though, and the mini-jacks are
> always prone to defects. So I'd still prefer to use a more
> 'professional' audio card since the application i'm writing is
> intended for live performances.
>   

Just a quick note here.  Some of the nicer X-Fi cards have either a 
drive bay panel or an external break-out box with 1/4" jacks (assuming 
these haven't been totally discontinued, I haven't looked in a while).  
As for the latency issue, most of the good X-Fi cards come with ASIO 
drivers (which Sonar should be able to take advantage of).

The biggest problem here is that Creative puts the X-Fi name on 
everything, so you have to do some digging to figure out which cards 
have the high quality hardware (the EMU20K1 chipset), and which ones are 
just pretending.


> The question I asked might be more general: consumer audio cards do
> have specific outputs for Front and Rear speakers, but professional
> audio cards just have 4 or more outputs. So how to assign them?
>   

It's going to depend on your OS and audio card drivers (which is 
probably why Dan asked).  OpenAL hasn't converged on a standard way of 
handling multi-channel output (let alone input), so various 
implementations will handle it in various ways.

I'm not sure how the Windows implementation handles it, so I'll defer 
this to someone more knowledgeable.

--"J"