OpenAL as state machine and mixer only, WAS: Re: OpenAL on VST

Has anyone on this list used OpenAL as a state machine and mixer (so no 
hardware accelleration) and accessing the resultant audio data directly?

What would be the best files to modify to do this? I know what I'm doing will 
be very grotesque, but I still want it to be clean as possible. For example, it 
would be nice to do no more than add a function that I can pass to a 
callback-based audio library and mostly leave the code alone outside of that 
(to make it less work for me maintaining the patch).

>> I think that from Creative's standpoint, OpenAL is just a specification,
>> with a (kindly provided) reference implementation. Of course, there are
Well, I'd like to take advantage of the reference implementation because, for 
one, I use it for standalone (non-VST) mode and I don't want to have to 
re-invent the wheel for something that might just be a slight modification.

>> several implementations around, some open-source, others not. My group,
>> for example, has built an implementation which uses ASIO as the backend
Is this something you'd be able to seperate and make into an ASIO port?

>> But as it stands now, it's not
>> clear how to make a multichannel reverb, dither, or nifty-effect-X,
>> without writing your own implementation. And the details of going
>> between different speaker layouts leave a number of interesting
>> challenges. 
Yeah, that seems something that would work better with direct access to each 
speaker. I think their might be a version of the LOKI extention for accessing 
multiple speakers. I know for sure there's one for stereo, but that's obviously 
not what you're talking about. OpenAL's interface is simple because it doesn't 
consider the actual layout, so I think it's mostly good if your application 
doesn't need to know those details. My synth doesn't need to know; you tell it 
X, Y and Z, but not which speaker.