[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell and sound

[Sven Panne]

Claus Reinke wrote:
> The thing that always confused me about OpenAL (www.openal.org) is
> the following part of the spec: [...]

The basic ideas behind OpenAL are quite easy and centered around 3 concepts:

    * Buffers containing (normally mono) audio data, which can be shared by
      sources (see below). This is where you put e.g. your WAV data.

    * Sources generating (perhaps directed) sound at a point in 3D space for
      the queues of buffers attached to them. These correspond to sound emitting
      entities in your virtual 3D world, e.g. enemies shooting at you. :-)

    * A single listener (= you) positioned at a point in 3D space.

OpenAL renders the sound to your audio device (stereo headphones, 5.1 speakers,
etc.) via a lower device layer (ALSA, DirectSound, etc.). It doesn't handle MIDI,
but there are e.g. extensions for microphone input. The "spirit" of OpenAL is very much
like OpenGL, and both fit quite nicely together, although you can use each of these
libraries on their own. It works on all major platforms (WinDoze, Linux, MacOS X, ...)
and is an "industrial-strength" library, meaning that even people who make their
living from programming use it, see e.g. Unreal Tournament 2004 and quite a few other
commercial games.

A few months ago I started an OpenAL binding for Haskell, see the fptools repository
at fptools/libraries/OpenAL. The basic functionality is there, but the binding is
not complete yet. The main reason for the latter is that I couldn't get my 4.1 speakers
working under my previous SuSE Linux, but I've just upgraded, so hopefully things
have improved and the binding can be finished.

Apart from that, having a binding for SDL would be nice, too, and somebody is already
working on it, IIRC.

Cheers,
    S.