[openal] Support SOFA in OpenAL?

Chris Robinson chris.kcat at gmail.com
Sat Dec 17 17:26:37 EST 2016


On 12/17/2016 04:57 AM, Christian Hoene wrote:
> 1) Shall I add libmysofa to the OpenAL library (not makehrtf)

I'm not sure. The idea of makehrtf is to ensure the HRTF data is in a 
convenient layout that's both small and quick to load, and ensures the 
data is laid out in a way that OpenAL Soft can use it. As far as I can 
tell, SOFA files have quite a few parameters, and data can be expressed 
in a few different ways, so would require some processing and a bunch of 
verification just to load one for the device. Having makehrtf convert 
SOFA files to OpenAL Soft's format gives an opportunity to alert the 
user that a dataset won't work, to provide options for how to use it, or 
to do the more heavy processing once so it loads quicker at run-time.

> 2) Does somebody still need the SOFA reader based on NetCDF and HDF5 in
> makehrtf? Shall this be continued?

Again, I'm not sure. Considering SOFA files use the NetCDF format, 
libnetcdf/libhdf5 would be the appropriate way to read them. But having 
a small, self-contained C library to load SOFA files would be ideal. It 
depends on how thoroughly a C library handles all the format features 
and quirks possible of SOFA files (not just existing ones, but most or 
all of what the standard allows for), and how cleanly it deals with the 
unexpected.

> 3) May I kick out the proprietary file HRTF format of OpenAL? Who will need
> this anyhow?

As much as I'd like to drop OpenAL Soft's mhr format and just load SOFA 
files directly, I think the preprocessing is still necessary to ensure 
correctness, load quickly, and be alterable for the users' needs 
(resampling a 44.1khz IR to 48khz or vice-versa, changing the 
minimum-phase cutoff length, etc).

I think a middle-ground would be to better integrate makehrtf with 
alsoft-config. So for example, in the GUI you would switch to the HRTF 
tab and click an Import Dataset... button, which brings up a dialog to 
select an input file (.def or .sofa) and set various options for it 
(sample rate, diffuse-field equalization, etc), then proceeding would 
invoke makehrtf and save the output in the appropriate user directory 
for OpenAL Soft to automatically see it.


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