Re: Final draft of ALUT spec?

Jason Daly wrote:

> > I'm suprised there aren't *EITHER* a full set of 5.1, etc *OR*
> > an insistance that this is a spatial API and therefore only
> > mono is supported.
> I think this was the thinking when the Windows implementation adopted 
> the convention that only mono buffers would be spatialized.
FWIW, I think that was a poor choice.  Providing API to allow the two
sides of a stereo image to be positioned separately in the alSource API
would have been a better way IMHO.  This could have been managed by
having the two stereo samples be always together by default - but
provide an  alSetSource3f ( AL_SOURCE_STEREO_SEPARATION_VECTOR, dx, dy, dz )
which would displace the two sides of the stereo by some distance
relative to the position/direction of the source.

That would have allowed all of the present functionality - but also
allowed you to use stereo samples without having to manually mono-ize them.

If you have a bunch of audio samples (grabbed as usual from who-knows-where)
then randomly, some of them can be attached to objects that move around
the world nicely and others mysteriously don't work (because they happen
to have been recorded in stereo).

Just because you can't immediately think of how to represent stereo
in a spatialised world doesn't mean that you have to prevent people from
doing things that are useful.

> The assumption was that multi-channel buffers contain music or other audio 
> that should be played as-is and not spatialized.
That's an assumption that *might* be true - but it's not certain.  So by
all means make that assumption be the default behavior - but at least
provide an easy way to override it.

Furthermore, you ALREADY have a flag that the developer can set to say
that this sound sample moves relative to the listener.  If he wanted
something to stay there (because it's general ambiance or music), he
can set it.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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