Thread: Audio

Hello!
Currently I'm planning to start programming the audio part of my game.

I'm a little bit confused. I googled and found out that DirectSound is practically gone for Vista. That means there's no point to use it. So what should I use? When googling it seems that everything is quite oriented to DirectSound and nobody mentions alternatives.

OpenAL
Ogg Vorbis

Or if you are rolling around in cash:
Miles Sound System.

I also found some info about XACT and it's a part of DirectX. Maybe you could say some advantages/disadvantages.

XACT seems to be primarily for C# XNA. I cannot find any good information on using XACT in C++ although I do think it is possible. However I will not use it regardless if it is possible or not. Microsoft killed DirectMusic and removed audio acceleration from Vista without so much as a hint of their plans. I'm not going to write code again that uses one of their sound systems just so they can yank the rug out from under it.

I've heard very good things about FMod as well, although I haven't used it.

I started with OpenAL, but I have already run into a problem.

The problem is about loading WAV files. All the tutorials I have read tell me to use a function called alutLoadWAVFile, but it seems to be some old function, as it's not included in SDK anymore. The samples that are included with SDK load the file manually instead. Is there some other, newer function to use or do I really have to load WAV-files manually?

That is available in freealut which is a thirdy party library for OpenAL and is also open-source.

OK, it works now.

I unfortunately don't know the meanings of some things. Maybe someone could tell me what are:

1) AL_VELOCITY
2) AL_ORIENTATION
3) AL_PITCH
4) AL_GAIN

They should be defined in the documentation that comes with OpenAL. I believe pitch is the pitch of the sound and gain is the volume of it. Velocity and orientation are more than likely something to do with 3D positioning of sounds.