Help. 5.1 was working, but...

[Scott Mayo]

Help. Someone - and I think it was someone on this list - gave me an openAL
.dll with a simple hack added. It checked for environment variable
ALSOFT_FORMAT being set to AL_FORMAT_51CHN16, and if it was, it let me
successfully use AL_POSITION to make sounds come from the appropriate
speakers in a 5.1 channel set up. And it worked. I don't recall why this
required a special hack, but I remember there was some reason and I think it
had to do with Vista. But with this .dll, it worked.

I don't know what changed. I'm pretty certain I didn't mess with the .dll,
and the env variable is still set, but openAL now confines itself to left
and right speakers. When I test the sound card with its control and test
app, I can still get sounds to come from each speaker in turn without
problem, so it's not the sound card, amps or speakers.

I'm running Vista, the sound card is a turtle beach audio advantage, and I'm
very frustrated. The whole application relies on software control of 5.1.
Can some help me make this work again?

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[Chris Robinson-5]

On Saturday 21 February 2009 3:11:40 pm Scott Mayo wrote:
> Help. Someone - and I think it was someone on this list - gave me an openAL
> .dll with a simple hack added. It checked for environment variable
> ALSOFT_FORMAT being set to AL_FORMAT_51CHN16, and if it was, it let me
> successfully use AL_POSITION to make sounds come from the appropriate
> speakers in a 5.1 channel set up.

That would likely have been me.

> I don't know what changed. I'm pretty certain I didn't mess with the .dll,
> and the env variable is still set, but openAL now confines itself to left
> and right speakers. When I test the sound card with its control and test
> app, I can still get sounds to come from each speaker in turn without
> problem, so it's not the sound card, amps or speakers.

Can you output the name of the opened device, and see what's being opened? And
the version, as well. IIRC, I added a hack like that for you because the
Windows version had no way to use a config file to set 5.1 mode, or it was
automatically overridden with the mode reported by Windows.. one or the other.

This problem should be fixed in OpenAL Soft 1.6, though. You can set a config
file in %AppData%\alsoft.ini (where %AppData% is the Application Data
directory for your user) and set a format=AL_FORMAT_51CHN16 line. The
environment variable ALSOFT_CONF can also be set to a full path+filename that
will be read similarly. As long as the format option is set to a non-blank
value, it'll override what Windows says.
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[Scott Mayo]

The device comes back as Generic Software (it's the only device that shows
up), and that's what I open. I don't know where to fetch the version number
from - it's not part of the file properties of the .dll - but the creation
date is 2/29/2008.

I've been playing with this some, and the behavior is disturbing. When I run
the turtle beach test app, I can specify a test that sends a voice to each
of 6 channels in turn, and that works fine. It also has a bizarre "make the
room spin" demo that pans the current sound around the room, and that works.
But the same sort of test done with openAl code puts some sound out of the
right surround channel, but dead silence out of the left. And the turtle
beach control app seems to like to enable a "stereo to multichannel" at
times, which might be related. But the positions going into openAL all make
sense.

I know I'm on a list run by Creative and that some folk here may be
employees, but can anyone recommend a decent quality USB sound card that is
known to work flawlessly with openAL and 5.1? I need reliable position
control over a handful of sources. And where can I get the latest openAL
dll?


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[Chris Robinson-5]

On Monday 23 February 2009 4:31:44 am Scott Mayo wrote:
> The device comes back as Generic Software (it's the only device that shows
> up), and that's what I open.

That's Creative's software driver, which only does stereo output. You'll need
to make sure OpenAL Soft's DLL is being found and used if you want it for 5.1
output.

> I know I'm on a list run by Creative and that some folk here may be
> employees, but can anyone recommend a decent quality USB sound card that is
> known to work flawlessly with openAL and 5.1? I need reliable position
> control over a handful of sources. And where can I get the latest openAL
> dll?

The latest DLLs are available from
http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal/Downloads/Forms/AllItems.aspx

As long as your sound card is capable of 5.1 output in DirectSound, OpenAL
Soft should have no problems working with it. If you want hardware
acceleration, you'll either need a hardware OpenAL driver (only Creative makes
some, currently, AFAIK), or accelerated DirectSound3D (however Windows Vista/7
don't allow this anymore).
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