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What sound library do you all recommend for a C++ custom engine?

None · 2020-09-06T09:05:32

I'm looking around for open source, fast, and free to use sound libraries to use in my little opengl c++ engine. All I want to do is play multiple sound effects and play background music.So far, I've found:fmod: I'm confused if this is free to use or if it's good for small projects like mine. I'm interested though.OpenAL: I read this was acquired by a company and is no longer free to use or not ideal for small projects. Is this true?SDL: I know what SDL is but I wouldn't like to include such a large framework into my project, I'm already using GLFW and happy with it. Granted, any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

General and Gameplay Programming Programming C++ sound

Started by EBZ August 20, 2020 09:09 PM

12 comments, last by RedBull4 3 years, 8 months ago

kop0113

2,466

August 24, 2020 09:11 PM

I recommend OpenAL Soft. It is small and portable to different operating systems.

The free software implementation can be found here: https://openal-soft.org/

It is LGPL licensed which means it is free to use forever and so long as you don't statically link against it (i.e using a .dll is fine) then you don't need to release your code under the GPL if you don't want to.

It is fairly easy to use for a positional audio library. There used to be a good tutorial on this site but I can't find it. I can point you towards one of my old projects with it in: https://github.com/osen/software-3d-renderer/blob/master/src/qplatform/Audio.cpp

Final thing I recommend is, rather than moving the “virtual ears” around, just pass object positions through the same view matrix you use to render them to the screen. I find this much cleaner and more flexible to get audio sources in the correct location. I am rambling, you will probably see what I mean when you get to it.

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hplus0603

11,917

August 25, 2020 03:04 AM

[quote]I also use the native audio API for each platform, but instead of mmsystem I use WASAPI on Windows.[/quote]

Absolutely! mmsystem (wavOutOpen() and friends) was designed for 16-bit windows, where Sound Blaster DMA buffers were the other alternative. It's not a low-latency API, unfortunately. WASAPI can easily get to 30 ms end-to-end latency, though, which is usually enough for most games. If you need better than that, you really need bespoke APIs like ASIO, anyway, or a wrapper like PortAudio (which is still about low-level device access, not “play these sounds” high-level stuff.)

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