[openal] Format clarification

[Miroslav Andel]

Thanks for that clarification! It would be awesome if could be 
documented in the header files, preferably in doxygen format.

Cheers,

Miroslav


On 2014-12-17 18:40, Chris Robinson wrote:
> On 12/17/2014 08:06 AM, Richard Furse wrote:
>> I can see a change in our codebase from 2010 where we changed this
>> from int32 to float. Are others assuming floats?
>
> OpenAL Soft treats those formats as floats. Though the name makes it 
> look like int (since it's just "32" instead of "_FLOAT32"), it doesn't 
> make much sense as int for a few reasons:
>
> There are no int32 mono or stereo formats.
>
> There would be no float32 multichannel formats to match the float32 
> mono and stereo formats (from AL_EXT_FLOAT32).
>
> As far as I know, most modern audio codecs natively decode to, if not 
> int16, to float32, which makes int32 less useful.
>
>
> That said, OpenAL Soft does have an AL_SOFT_buffer_samples[1] 
> extension which provides support for int8, uint8, int16, uint16, 
> int24, uint24, int32, uint32, float, and double sample types (easily 
> extendable to more). However, there's a compatibility issue that 
> prevents me from suggesting its use or adoption -- the 
> AL_BYTE_RW_OFFSETS_SOFT macro has the same value as AL_SOURCE_RADIUS 
> from AL_EXT_SOURCE_RADIUS (0x1031), and since they can both be passed 
> to alGetSourcefv, that makes it impossible to properly support both 
> extensions. So I'll probably have to drop AL_SOFT_buffer_samples (and 
> AL_SOFT_buffer_sub_data) to support AL_EXT_SOURCE_RADIUS, and make a 
> diifferent AL_SOFT_buffer_samples2 or AL_EXT_buffer_samples extension 
> that has unique enum values. But unfortunately I still haven't gotten 
> a response from Ryan (icculus) about write access to the extension 
> registry, to avoid enum clashes like that again.
>
>
> [1] 
> <http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal-extensions/SOFT_buffer_samples.txt>
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