So the beginner forum isn't my usual posting place, but I've done mostly graphics. Even my most 'complete' little games have very primitive sound: On linux I dump bytes to /dev/dsp, and on windows I just call sndPlaySound(). It is not a solution! Now that I am finally finding the time to sit down and finish writing a simple, focused, complete game and am finding myself at the point where I need to add a much more robust sound solution.


I know there's SDL, WaveOut, OpenAL, etc. From those who have used these (or something else), what do you think would be the best fit for my project:

- My project is in plain C. If sound needs a C++ library and I need to wrap it with some C, its not the end of the world, but C is preferred.
- I need to run in Windows and Linux so DirectSound is out.
- WaveOut is acceptable since it just delivers raw sound bytes. ie. on linux I would just dump to /dev/snd and the actual mixing code can largely by shared.


For a simple project that just runs background music + playing a few effects, is it better to just write my own simple mixer and dump to the card (the old way), or will I really reap a lot of benefits using a fancy API that can do hardware mixing?

I suppose this is the same question that used to be asked when software rasterization was on the way out for graphics.

In terms of functionality, all I really need is:

-Looping
-per-sound-effect volume control
-stereo panning (I don't need fancy 3d positional reflection, occlusion, etc)
-maybe simple echo/reverb

Perhaps SFML? It's C++ though, but the audio part of it seems simple. I've never used it though, actually I never have really used any sound API yet.

Thanks, I'll check out FMOD. I never heard of it, yet the userbase seems bigger then openAL. But its the right price... FREE!

I also looked at SFML. The sound tutorial made the API look super-straightforward, just load some buffers and play them. And its 'more free.'

I'll play with both of them for a bit.