Re: NSSound

[Stefan Bidigaray]

Fred,

 

To tell you the truth, I'm still playing around quite a bit with this.  I'll make sure to change the class version once I get home tonight.

 

I just wrote a really long list of stuff I dislike about having gnustep_sndd and using OpenAL instead of portaudio, but I decided not to send that.  Really, I think the most compeling reason that I went with OpenAL is for how simple it is, and it's cross-platformness (that's right, new word :) ), not to mention we're just re-inventing the wheel by having our own sound server... ALSA, OSS, winmm, CoreAudio all already implement software mixing with a lot more features and optimization that gnustep_sndd.  Why have our own, prone to bugs since very few people use it, when we can use the native OS's version?

 

As for the move to libsndfile, is just my personal preference.  As of version 1.18 (earlier this year) it supports Ogg and FLAC, and since 1.12 it supports virtual I/O, which allows me to implement initWithData: (which I've been doing).  It also supports SoundDesigner 2 and CAF (both supported by Apple's NSSound).

 

I do appreciate all and any suggestions.  If I haven't mentioned it before, I'm not a programmer by trade, I know I will make mistakes.  Also, let me know if you need me to elaborate a little more on my decision to go with OpenAL instead of gnustep_sndd+portaudio.

 

Stefan