Sound and music

[cragwolf]

What options are available for the cross-platform Pascal game developer when it comes to sound and music? I want my game to be able to play mp3 or ogg files for music, and some uncompressed format (e.g. wav, but is there something better than wav?) for bang-bang and vroom-vroom sounds.

[M109uk]

I personally use OpenAL, its cross-platform, free and easy to use...

Homepage: Here (http://www.openal.org) and you can get the Delphi headers from Here (http://www.noeska.com/doal/) as well as a few samples on how to use it..

[WILL]

OpenAL is usually best for Sound Effects. However if you are going to have music you may want to look at either MP3 or OGG libraries that'll take advantage of OpenAL or there is SDL as an alternative. It even supports MOD files, which are a great alternative to MP3 and OGG because they behave like MIDI files only with digial sound files as the instruments.

I'm a big fan of MODs because you can even do a bit more with them since they are not a simple 1 or 2 channel raw audio feed. Dispite the compression, MP3 and OGG are just compressed raw audio files. Modules contain so much more, the pattern which are like music sheets, the digital instruments played by those patterns and the order that lists the patterns to be played in. Plus you have up to something like 64- channels to work with. If you have a really good engine you can even do more advanced stuff like jummping from one part of the song for a specific action or mood you want to establish in the game. Quite versitile...

Other commonly used libs are JEDI-SDL(or just SDL if you have headers), FMOD and BASS.

[cragwolf]

Thanks for your suggestions.