Sound APIs?

If your project is not for profit, I'd reccommend FMOD.

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Original post by Simian Man If your project is not for profit, I'd reccommend FMOD.

Wow, I love their pricing policy.

Still want to hear other opinions though.

If you are Windows only, then I would suggest using DirectSound with all software buffers (to avoid hardware bugs). Or, perhaps even better, the XACT tool and library -- it's a really nifty authoring and integration environment. The one draw-back with XACT is that it doesn't support easy streaming of OGG or MP3 (or even WMA!) compressed audio -- it's 4:1 ADPCM or nothing.

XACT comes free with the later DirectX SDKs, although you need to include an installer for the XACT library in your game distribution.

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Original post by hplus0603 If you are Windows only, then I would suggest using DirectSound with all software buffers (to avoid hardware bugs). Or, perhaps even better, the XACT tool and library -- it's a really nifty authoring and integration environment. The one draw-back with XACT is that it doesn't support easy streaming of OGG or MP3 (or even WMA!) compressed audio -- it's 4:1 ADPCM or nothing. XACT comes free with the later DirectX SDKs, although you need to include an installer for the XACT library in your game distribution.

Right now I'm programming for Windows only, but that might change if PS3 comes with linux...

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Original post by DanoruX Quote: Original post by Simian Man If your project is not for profit, I'd reccommend FMOD. Wow, I love their pricing policy. Still want to hear other opinions though.

Even if your project is for profit, you should fork over the cash for FMOD, it's exceptional and still relatively cheap if you're serious (or get the shareware discount).

I highly suggest OpenAL. I made an audio engine, complete with WAV suppot and streaming OGGs, in under a week. And to top that off,I have had NO experience in audio programming.

I believe gamedev.net has an excellent article on streaming OGG files with OpenAL.

Also, I too am using DirectX for things like rendering (actually, just rendering). Don't be afraid to combine OpenAL with Direct3D - They work perfectly together.

Though with OpenAL I have some problems. One of the mst annoying one is that the sounds volume is very low on most computers. But for the rest it is a great sound package which can be used very easily and is cross-platform useable.

I would recommend OpenAL, but only with the DirectSound wrapper on Windows. Nvidia and Creative have their custom 'optimized' implementations, but some versions are quite unstable.