The SL Sound and Mixer Libraries.
By Steve Baker
Introduction.
The 'SL' sound library is primarily targetted towards producing sound
effects for games, and isn't really intended for playing music (although
you could certainly use it for doing that). The emphasis is on low
CPU impact and low latency rather than high quality and fancy MIDI/MOD
facilities.
SL is a part of PLIB.
The 'SL' sound library will eventually become a fully portable freeware
sound library that should run on all major platforms. Right now, SL
runs under:
- Linux on systems with OSS (the Open Sound System) installed
(it's usually a standard part of the kernel).
- Windows NT, 95 and 98.
- OpenBSD.
- SGI's IRIX.
- Other UNIX systems using OSS (which should include Solaris, FreeBSD,
BSD/OS, SCO and others) should be able to run the Linux version of
SL by adding '-DSL_USING_OSS_AUDIO' to the compile command line.
At present, there is no support for Apple's MacOS sound systems
- although it is hoped that these will be added in the near future.
- The SL Library
deals with all aspects of sample replay for games and
other realtime applications - it is designed such that it can be
ported to other operating systems by replacing just the slDSP
class.
- The SM Library
controls the audio mixer on a PC sound card and
probably only works 100% correctly within OSS - and then probably
only on fairly 'vanilla' Soundblaster-compatible sound cards.
Portability of SM is patchy - regard it as a bonus.
It is due to the relative non-portability of the SM routines
that these are in a separate library. For non-portable
applications, SL and SM can be considered as a single library.
Download the Open Sound System
drivers (previously known as VoxWare).
