FMOD. But that's if you can afford the license you will be needing if you want to sell your game. OpenAL is free as long as you dynamically link to it, but you get what you pay for - ie not that much. Anything you can do in AL you can do faster and easier in FMOD.

Now before you denounce me as some FMOD fanatic, that's Rob, not me [wink], I have only used it once. And that was when Rob posted his devpak for it. I have spent the last 6 weeks with OpenAL. I like what I have been finally able to accompish with AL, but it was a lot of work. Nevertheless, it is my code, so it is something to be proud of. If you really want to learn about everything associated with sound and cannot afford FMOD, use OpenAL. If you can afford FMOD, then use that. Just a few opinions of mine. I can say I am an OpenAL fan myself...

- Drew

Why not use BASS instead of FMOD? It's free AFAIK

Hi. I'm messing around with sound for a while (weeks)
and what I found out is, that FMOD is the best choice
for freeware games. Someone said something about the
BASS sound system. BASS is nearly as good as FMOD and
the licence is similar - free for freeware, expensive
for comercial use. The only difference is the price...
But what I wanna do is something "good" and free as
OpenAL.
And here's my questlion:
Can someone tell me what to use if I want to sell it
in the end? I heard that OpenAL is bad in performance.
What about SDL mixer? Is it worth the struggle?

Quote:Original post by Spolana
And here's my questlion:
Can someone tell me what to use if I want to sell it
in the end? I heard that OpenAL is bad in performance.
What about SDL mixer? Is it worth the struggle?

*Sirens Go Off* Not quite. Take a look at the games that use OpenAL. Look at the second and third from last. Now, tell me that it has bad performance [smile]. From what I have seen, OpenAL is great in what it does, but the matter of the fact is that it can't do that much. You would only use SDL_mixer if you had a SDL game. You can't use it outside of SDL, so that's a problem if you don't want to use SDL.

The main issue with OpenAL right now is lack of development. I had not used it for over 1 year until recently. It is still the same. There have been some small updates recently, but that's about it. However, everything you need to do in OpenAL is in the demo project file that comes with the SDK. It shows how to do just about *everything*, so that makes your life a lot easier. Another big problem with OpenAL is that the OGG support is kind of unstable. I have yet to use it, so I do not know how well it will work for me, but I can get back to you on that. There is something someone made called OpenAL++. It is supposed to improve OpenAL, but I have not used that.

Other than that it is a solid library. My biggest quirks were my misunderstanding of how it works. This came from following most of the devmaster tutorials, which serve as a good starting point, but not so good when you are making a library. Right now I have not had a problem with it, and I am doing a lot with OpenAL. I can load as many wav files as possible into buffers (really inefficient though) and use my audio library to mange them when they need to be played. I think you should definitly give OpenAL a try since it's free. THe reason I did not support BASS is that if you want something free, you can use OpenAL. If you want something that you have to pay for, FMOD is a better choice, I beleive...

If you are willing to work to make a good audio library, then OpenAL is worth the struggle, because the struggle is not necessarily gaurnteed. I know I did, but you might be able to breeeze through it with no problems at all. That's just programming, you never know. So I'd say if you have the time and patience, and want not to spend an arm and a leg on the audio component, take the OpenAL route.

- Drew

BTW: Bass costs ~1093.44 right now in US currency for one title, which is 1/2 as much as FMOD. Here are the games that use BASS.

[Edited by - Drew_Benton on February 13, 2005 9:11:22 PM]