Haskell and sound (was: [Haskell-cafe] Toy application advice wanted)

[Claus Reinke]

> Looking over the PortAudio specs it's good for a software processing
> environment but not a lot of use to eg a game. OpenAL appears to be much
> the other way round.

The thing that always confused me about OpenAL (www.openal.org) is
the following part of the spec:

    OpenAL Fundamentals
    OpenAL (henceforth, the "AL") is concerned only with rendering audio 
    into an output buffer, and primarily meant for spatialized audio. There is 
    no support for reading audio input from buffers at this time, and no 
    support for MIDI and other components usually associated with audio 
    hardware. Programmers must relay on other mechanisms to obtain audio
    (e.g. voice) input or generate music. 

other potential options, depending on intended use:

    Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library 
    designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, 
    joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. 
    http://www.libsdl.org/

    MidiShare is a musical operating system for Macintosh (MacOS Classic 
    and MacOSX), Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98, Windows NT/2000/XP, 
    Atari and Linux. Result of many years of research and development 
    undertaken by Computer Music Research Laboratory of Grame, 
    MidiShare provides high level services to the field of computer music 
    and MIDI applications.
    http://www.grame.fr/MidiShare/

others?

cheers,
claus