[Openal] OpenAL-Soft & multiple devices on one card

[Chris Robinson]

On Monday 02 March 2009 7:22:33 pm Troy Yee wrote:
> Chris:
>
> I hope my last wasn't taken as being critical... it wasn't meant to be.

No worries. :) Sorry I missed your last question, though:

> I'm far from expert on ALSA but it strikes me that
> different ALSA tools are able to discriminate between the different
> devices - are they using something outside of the ALSA API to do that?

Pragmatically, there's no problems accessing the separate devices. It's just 
that since OpenAL's enumeration and selection is completely string-based, if 
two devices end up with the same string, OpenAL Soft can't know which one an 
app means. It can't use the string's position in an array or list because the 
string pointer may not be from the same array/list (ie. it can be a copy).

What I'll likely end up doing is appending the card,device numbers that get 
passed to ALSA, to make sure it's at least unique enough for OpenAL Soft's 
purposes with ALSA.

> I'm definitely going to need a way to open something other than the
> first of the enumerated devices sharing the same name.  What is the
> current release plan (timing) for OpenAL Soft 1.7?

I'll probably be making another release in a couple weeks. Maybe even by this 
weekend, though no promises. I'm still deciding on what to do about the SDL 
backend, as I'm not sure I'll keep it as it is.