[openal] Support SOFA in OpenAL?

[Chris Robinson]

On 01/22/2017 04:53 AM, Christian Hoene wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> the new libmysofa version 0.4 has been released. It includes the
> normalization, efficient filter lookup, and filter interpolation.
> https://github.com/choene/libmysofa
>
> With the new version of libmysofa, it would be even easier to support
> SOFA in OpenAL-Soft, because you do not need the netcdf libraries,
> you do not have to implement new HRTF lookup and interpolation
> algorithm, and a you not new storage format for OpenAL.
>
> The more I think, the less sense it makes to continue the approach I
> have started in https://github.com/choene/openal-soft (with the
> vanilla NETCDF and SOFA libraries and extending OpenAL to support
> SOFA), but to use libmysofa everytime OpenAL-Soft needs a new set of
> FIR filters...

I'm not keen on using libmysofa to handle the HRTFs in the OpenAL Soft 
library itself. OpenAL Soft handles more than just SOFA files, and the 
SOFA storage layout doesn't seem to be designed for efficient run-time 
access (relatively speaking). I feel OpenAL Soft's needs and internal 
design for handling HRTF is a bit too specialized to have a simplified 
loader do the work, and would rather just use it in the makehrtf utility 
to get at the information stored in the file.