On 06-03-2002 11:57 PM, a contributor named nomad made the following remark:
now that my image-loading problem is done. let’s move to sounds.
which one would you recommend for 3d sounds? pros and cons? is it also advisable to write your own sound-library???
You mean for loading different file formats, such as mp3, midi, etc., or just doing sound effects in general?
FMOD has a nice mix of both. It allows you to load a variety of waveform and segmented formats, and you can manipulate your sound in many ways. FMOD’s pretty bitchin’ fast, compared to other audio libraries.
http://www.fmod.org
Pros: Supports many file formats–mp3, ogg vorbis, screamtracker3, etc–as well as a variety of effects–reverb, preverb, echo,etc–and it’s easy to use.
Cons: It don’t work on Macintosh. I don’t know if it ever will, though. Also, depending on what you’re gonna do with your project, you may have to pay for it. It’s free to try out, though. See their licensing for details. In addition, it doesn’t support SoundTracker .MOD format for some reason, only ProTracker and FastTracker .MOD
If you don’t really care about which file format you’re using, and just want to focus on effects, I guess you can check out OpenAL. I don’t know too much about it, I haven’t gotten it to work on Borland yet, and I haven’t seen any programs that actually use OpenAL.
http://www.openal.org
Pros: Works on a variety of operating systems.
Cons: Doesn’t really support actually loading your sound data. Doesn’t like MIDI. The company who made it, Loki Entertainment Software, is dead now, so finding the place to download it from is also a pain.
I use FMOD myself, because loading different file formats is important to me for what I write. As for writing your own sound library, I guess you could…that is, if you know how to.