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• Announcing a new OpenAL for MacOSX (posted 2003-10-12 20:15:32 by icculus):
  

  I've developed a new OpenAL implementation almost from scratch for MacOS X. Some notable features:

  This implementation of the OpenAL API is _NOT_ the one from openal.org...it was originally based on the openal.org MacOS 9 version, but is an almost total rewrite of that codebase.

  This codebase is designed around and optimized for MacOS X and its CoreAudio API. It does not work on MacOS 9 at all. Some notable features that set it apart from the standard openal.org Mac implementation:

  • Speed. This is currently the fastest AL implementation for OSX, even counting the new CoreAudio support in openal.org's CVS.
  • Contains optimizations for Altivec-enabled systems, but has scalar fallbacks for G3 and older systems.
  • Is designed with multithreading in mind...should be 100% thread safe, and can take advantage of multiple CPU systems internally.
  • Can handle multiple contexts on multiple devices, all running in parallel.
  • Supports the AL_ENUMERATION_EXT extension for device enumeration.
  • Supports AL_EXT_vorbis for direct playback of Ogg Vorbis audio; the Vorbis decoder is a highly optimized and Altivec-enabled fork of xiph.org's libvorbis-1.0...using this extension can be significantly faster and easier for the application than using a stock libvorbis and buffer queueing.
  • Codebase is designed to be maintainable and flexible. Adding new data types (as demostrated by AL_EXT_vorbis) is fairly easy.
  • Supports AL_EXT_buffer_offset, which is basically an extended form of AL_BYTE_LOKI, for when you have to get down and dirty at the lowlevel of audio playback.
  • Supports IBM's G5 compiler (and, of course, Apple's GCC).

  This implementation is fairly robust, but in many ways can still be considered a "mini-AL" library...it is enough to play UT2003 well, but some features of a complete OpenAL library are missing, and some elements are not perfectly in line with the 1.0 specification at this time. Bug reports and patches to make the implementation more robust are welcome.

  Please see the file COPYING for licensing information, TODO for things still to be done, and INSTALL for basic installation instructions.

  Bug reports can go to my personal email address for now. If this software proves to be wildly popular, I'll set up a mailing list for it. There are mailing lists details for general OpenAL development questions unrelated to a specific implementation at www.openal.org.

  The project page (with download information) is here.

  Have fun.

  
  --icculus.

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