[openal] openal Digest, Vol 31, Issue 2

[Chris Robinson]

On 08/11/2016 03:10 PM, Matthew Swartz wrote:
> Stereo sources for pretty much everything would
> be great if possible.

Stereo doesn't really work well for 3D sounds. Given that a stereo sound 
defines a pseduo-2D front ~60-degree soundfield for the listener, it'd 
be pretty limited for positioning cues outside of that. Especially when 
you have full 3D output, it wouldn't be that great to have the sound 
only come from the front, and not from the sides, back, up, or down (and 
even if you could move it, the irregular shape of the human head 
prevents a stereo sound 'image' from being perceived well when coming 
from the sides, or vertically).

What could be interesting and perhaps more useful is an option to fade 
between multichannel and 3D mono given the distance to the source. So 
for instance, when a source and listener have the same position, it's a 
normal multichannel sound. When the source is at its reference distance, 
it's monoized and positioned in 3D space (or perhaps using something 
like the radius property to determine how much it's monoized at a given 
distance by its spread). Could be particularly useful with B-Format 3D 
buffers, so the listener is fully enveloped when at the sound, which 
also rotates with the listener's head, and fades to a point sound as it 
moves away.

> Also, I may be wrong here, but do you support the
> Opus format (I'm feeling too lazy to check atm)?

OpenAL doesn't directly support compressed formats. It's up to the app 
to decide what formats it wants to use and how to decode them, whether 
it wants to stream longer tracks or fully decode shorter sound effects, 
and OpenAL will gladly play the decoded PCM samples regardless of where 
they came from.

There are/were a few extensions for OpenAL to handle compressed formats 
like Vorbis and MP3, but those are deprecated given that they don't give 
the app a lot of control (decode on the fly? pre-decode? require a 
container? multi-stream containers?). OpenAL Soft has never supported those.

The only compression format extensions OpenAL Soft has are for IMA4 
ADPCM (which was already there in the original code I started with), and 
MSADPCM... and I'd probably get rid of them if I could, except I know 
the latter is used by at least one thing and I don't want to break it.