[openal] Support SOFA in OpenAL?

[Christian Hoene]

Hi Chris,

no problem at all. It is your project.

Based on your wishes, I made a pull request for the vanilla SOFA reader, which extends makehrtf.

In the core, only a bare minimal number of changes have been made.

With best regards,

 Christian Hoene



-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Chris Robinson [mailto:chris.kcat at gmail.com] 
Gesendet: Sonntag, 22. Januar 2017 19:06
An: 'openal mailing list' <openal at openal.org>
Cc: Christian Hoene <christian.hoene at symonics.com>
Betreff: Re: AW: Support SOFA in OpenAL?

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.