[maemo-developers] [maemo-developers] Sound/music library for use in games on maemo

[From: Serge Semashko]

Kuisma Salonen wrote:

> currently the situation is not the best one, due to some reasons (I 
> won't be too specific here) the SDL audio relies on ESD which relies on 
> DSP for now.
> 
> If your game is using SDL, you probably want to use SDL and SDL_Mixer 
> for audio, as they are shipped with the system. Of course you can use 
> for example ESD but it is recommended to use SDL since it's most 
> supported game programming API on the platform, and even if it uses now 
> ESD for audio, it might change in the future to use DSP directly, so 
> when relying on the SDL you wouldn't have to change anything if those 
> will be improved.

Well, I probably did not explain the situation quite well. What we need
is to play ogg soundtrack in a loop for background music. We currently
use Allegro library for graphics/multimedia and oggvorbis libraries for
ogg files decoding. So ogg datastream will be most likely decoded using
ARM core on Nokia 770 consuming some precious cpu cycles. I have read
somewhere that gstreamer for example can use DSP core of OMAP1710 to
optimize processing of multimedia content.

A very high level library that can just load music file and then play it
in a loop while using hardware in the most efficient way would be nice
to have. SDL_Mixer is just such a high level library, but is it (will it
be?) implemented efficiently on maemo?

I'm asking that because we will probably need to switch sound/music
anyway because of some other reasons (not related to port to maemo).
So I'm evaluating different alternatives: SDL + SDL_Mixer, OpenAL, or
maybe gstreamer itself? A wrong choice now can make porting ufo2000 to
nokia770 more difficult in the future when I manage to get the real
device in my hands :)

-- 
Serge Semashko
ufo2000 development team
http://ufo2000.sourceforge.net