OpenAL for CrossPlatform Development

Question

OpenAL is one confusing project to pull up relevant information on. Is there an official OpenAL anymore? What is creativelabs control over the project?

I am looking for a cross platform audio library to support IOS (iPhones, Ipads), Android, Windows and Linux.

Does OpenAL fill this need? What is OpenAL's license? Although we intend to release some of our source code we have no interest in being forced to because of a license conflict.

There is enough evidence for me to assume it is working on Android Relevant links (Android OpenAL?) plus google searches yield positive results.

I realize Android has OpenSL officially supported. However Android appears to be the only platform which supports OpenSL currently so this is not an option.

Venitavenite

You could check to see if PortAudio supports iOS and Android -- it def supports windows, Linux and MacOS X, but it may be lower level than OpenAL, which I've never used. PA has a nice BSD-like license. I think someone is working on PA support for android, and while I'm pretty sure there is no support for iOS, it shouldn't be hard to take the old Mac OS X code and get iOS to work from there. There's also rtaudio, which may be better as far as that goes. You could also see what cinder and openframeworks use. – Muco

Answer 1

I went with OpenAL-soft and OpenAL for windows. They are both the same interface so still one code base.

Android was easy. https://github.com/AerialX/openal-soft-android

IOS was even easier. You can add OpenAL.Framework to your XCode project. The header location is just different (OpenAL/al.h vs AL/al.h).

Linux is very easy. Install the openal dev package for your distro.

Windows was the biggest pain for OpenAL. In the end just install the original OpenAL SDK from creative. OpenAL does seem very choppy on Windows though. I get some popping and crackles now and then where on every other platform it is perfect. I might switch to OpenAL-soft for the windows distribution before release.

Venitavenite

what problems did you have with openal-soft in windows, or did you have any? – Garnishment

Answer 2

Since version 1.1 Open AL apparently isn't free software anymore. Previous versions of Open AL (1.0 and previous I think) had BSD license, now it has been copyrighted by Creative. Despite it's "open" prefix, it's not free anymore. Here is the first section of the license for 1.1, taken from the "SDK installer" from this link:

    LICENSE
    1.  Grant of License
        The Software is licensed, not sold, to you for use only under the
     terms of this Agreement.  This License Agreement is your proof of 
    license to exercise the rights granted herein and must be retained by 
    you.  As between you and Creative (and, to the extent applicable, its 
    licensors), Creative retains all title to and ownership of the Software 
    and reserves all rights not expressly granted to you.  The license under 
    this Section 1 is conditioned upon your compliance with all of your 
    obligations under this Agreement.  Creative grants to you the right to 
    use all or a portion of this Software provided that:

        (a) the Software is not distributed for profit;
        (b) the Software may NOT be modified;
        (c) all copyright notices are maintained on the Software;
        (d) the licensee/end-user agrees to be bound by the terms of this 
    agreement;
        (e) Creative's BBS/FTP/website are the only on-line sites where 
    Licensee may download electronic files containing the Software; and        
        (f) Licensee shall use the Software solely for the purpose of 
    developing Licensee applications compatible with Creative’s products, 
    unless otherwise agreed to by further written agreement from Creative.

So if you want to use an open source royalty free version, you can only use it for the previous versions of Open AL. Which I can only find from the Quake 3's engine source code.

You might want to explore some other alternatives.

Sympathizer