I was working with FMOD for some time, but then I decided to go commercial and, in an effort to save money, I switched to the free license of OpenAL. Since then I've had a number of reports from testers that OpenAL is really garbage for most of them, especially since I'm using OGG files. I am now fairly certain that it will be more economical to spend the money and switch back. But the whole thing makes me wonder: Have you tried to use OpenAL? What are your thoughts on the subject?

I had a quick look over OpenAL a while back.

I focuses mainly on the 3D sound thing (with listeners, sources and stuff). It has also got access to Creative's EAX.

You should still be able to use stuff like Ogg Vorbis, since it has support for streaming buffers.

If you are looking for alternatives, you might want to check out PortAudio (provides access to a threaded stream) which is portable too.

Still a lot of work to be done, versus a $100 FMOD. Did you check out BASS as well?

What I think a lot of other APIs are missing is a way to simply mix a bunch of effects (I don't even care about the 3D so much, panning is enough for most games I would say) and support for music streams (OggVorbis minimal).

AL is a pretty minimalist API. It gives you a very low level view of sound hardware. If you're content to write all the complicated difficult stuff like mod playing and streaming effects and ogg decoding* yourself, it's a good choice. Otherwise FMOD or BASS might well have been an easier choice.

Cas :)

* ogg support coming natively to AL soon though,

check KSound, 75$ for both mac, pc and pocket pc.

It doesn't have any fancy reverb echo multi flanging effect, but who needs that ? ;)

http://www.phelios.com/ptk for trial.

You'll also won't need any external DLL.

pat.

Ack! Bad time to hear this. Last night I just replaced my game's DirectSound/DirectMusic sound engine with one I whipped up using OpenAL...

Then there is also http://audiere.sourceforge.net/ that might some cases be suitable solution :)

OpenAL's done me fine, but then, I don't do anything remotely complicated. I just play waves out of it.

Cas :)

I'm thinking of adding OGG support to it... the new beta includes OGG support, but it's supposed to be VERY BETA. I could write my own ogg handler for it, though... if I find I need it. Right now I'm just using WAV files for sound effects (my music player is still using DirectMusic), but the reduced size for sound effects is tempting...

I found OpenAL a lot easier to use than I feared... considering I re-created my entire sound engine in a single evening, starting with knowing next to NOTHING about OpenAL.

Oh yes, I also had a pretty easy time getting OpenAL to work, at first. But then some beta testers started to complain that they couldn't play music, and the more i dug into the problem the more frayed my nerves became. I guess if OpenAL could improve on it's OGG support then it would be ok.

The only real complaint I have about OpenAL is that I can't just ask for the maximum number of harware channels, I have to keep creating emitters until one fails.

There are no software channels in OpenAL, another disadvantage - I can rely on the software mixing in FMOD to cope with anything really stupid I do.