Wine sound discussion summary

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 11:00 PM, Ken Thomases <ken at codeweavers.com> wrote:
> On Dec 6, 2009, at 10:08 AM, Stefan Dösinger wrote:
>
>> Am 06.12.2009 um 15:32 schrieb Roderick Colenbrander:
>>> This audio engine is quite similar to
>>> pulseaudio and it offers functionality like per stream volume which
>>> normal APIs like oss/alsa/openal don't offer, so these APIs would map
>>> better to a sound server than to a standard library.
>> I am wondering: Does CoreAudio on OSX offer similar features? Or do we need a sound server there as well if we want to support them?
>
> I'm not particularly familiar with any audio API other than Core Audio, so I'm not sure how comparable the feature sets are, but per-stream volume and such are available.
>
> Core Audio is not particularly close to the hardware.  I think it's roughly similar to a sound server type of architecture.  There's no problem with multiple apps producing audio, or anything like that.  It's pretty "virtual"/abstracted.
>
>
> On Dec 7, 2009, at 5:15 AM, Roderick Colenbrander wrote:
>
>> I have no idea to what degree other implemenations of OpenAL will pick up these changes and
>> what the quality of the (closed) OSX branch is.
>
> What makes you say the OS X branch is closed?
>
> svn://connect.creativelabs.com/OpenAL/trunk/OpenAL-MacOSX
>
> Apple has links at http://www.opensource.apple.com/ to the OpenAL that ships with each version of Mac OS X, although Creative seems to have reorganized their site and Apple's links are dead.  Still, the above SVN URL should be current.
>
> -Ken
>

The svn indeed contains their current code. Although it seems to be
from 2006 and it looks like it had no recent activity. What worries me
is that this is really a different OpenAL implementation (it is all
c++ and shares no code with the other libs). I'm worried about the
future of OpenAL on OSX though.

Roderick