openal future

[Yvan Vander Sanden]

My apologies for asking this, since it seems a bit rude to question
all the good work done, especially by people in their free time.

But the thing is, i'm working on a quite large art project at the
moment in which 3d sound is very important. I made the first tests at
the beginning of the year with the openal library and had good
results. And I really liked the part where I could even take wall
reflections into account, although I have not tried it out yet. (In
fact, I cannot find that documentation anymore. It seems it's not on
the current site??)

But now I'm working on the real project and it's time to choose an
audio engine. And I'll will be working on this project for several
years, I guess. I choose linux as a platform because it's more likely
to keep stable (and i did not want the operating system the only thing
not open source in the project). OpenGL development is making good
progress, thanks to irrlicht.

But what about openAL? I've seen some bad signs lately. Wasn't there
an openal.org site? It's gone and redirected to
http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal, but everything on that site is
more than a year old too. Last changes date from 5/30/2008.

Ok, there's openAL soft. Didn't trust that one at first, since the
information is quite minimalistic. But by looking at the repository I
found out Chris Robinson is quite active in developing it. My respect
for that if you're reading this, Chris. But then again, the project
relies on one man only, which is always a risk.

And although Daniel is always very active in helping everyone here, I
have my doubts about help from Creative in the long run. The X-FI
drivers for Linux have not been a set good example either.

Of course OpenAL as such is an open standard, but programming can't do
with standards alone, it needs a library, good documentation and not
in the least progress.

Perhaps more experienced programmers could assure me that it's not
that bad as I think it looks. But I'm very eager to hear some opinions
on this, before I start getting a lot of openAL code into my project.

Thanks for reading,

yvan
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[Jason Daly]

Yvan Vander Sanden wrote:
> But what about openAL? I've seen some bad signs lately. Wasn't there
> an openal.org site? It's gone and redirected to
> http://connect.creativelabs.com/openal, but everything on that site is
> more than a year old too. Last changes date from 5/30/2008.
>  

The server that hosted the old web site was on its last legs, and the
new site was merged into Creative's overall web site as a matter of
convenience (the Creative open source pages are on the same site, for
example).

No offense to Dan, as I'm sure that the new site was forced on him by
the higher-ups, but I've never been happy with the new web site either.  
However, it does get the job done.  There hasn't been many changes on
the site, because there haven't been any revisions to specs or
documentations.  If you look, though the download links do have the
newest implementations available, including OpenAL-Soft 1.7, which was
just released last month, I believe.


> Ok, there's openAL soft. Didn't trust that one at first, since the
> information is quite minimalistic. But by looking at the repository I
> found out Chris Robinson is quite active in developing it. My respect
> for that if you're reading this, Chris. But then again, the project
> relies on one man only, which is always a risk.
>  

There's no reason not to trust OpenAL-Soft.  It's quite simply the best
software implementation available.  It started with Creative's original
software implementation for Windows, to which Chris has added quite a
number of enhancements.

As to the risk, even if Chris stops working on it, the code is
open-source, so if you ever run into any problems with it, you're free
to dive in and fix it.


> And although Daniel is always very active in helping everyone here, I
> have my doubts about help from Creative in the long run. The X-FI
> drivers for Linux have not been a set good example either.
>  

Have you tried the latest X-Fi drivers for Linux (the 1.0 release)?  I
have no idea why they were shipped so silently, but they seem to have
addressed just about every problem I ever had with them.  I downloaded
them, followed the instructions, and they just worked (even on Fedora 10
64-bit), no quirky installation, no clunky recompiling, no problems
loading the modules.  I was quite surprised, and very pleased.

Don't go to the old Beta site, go to the regular Creative Labs driver
download site.  The latest driver was released November of 2008.

Also, keep in mind that Creative did release many of the hardware
details of the X-Fi to the OSS and ALSA projects, so there will be
drivers at some point.


> Of course OpenAL as such is an open standard, but programming can't do
> with standards alone, it needs a library, good documentation and not
> in the least progress.
>  

What documentation are you missing?  The core spec is pretty complete.  
A lot of the extensions could be documented better, but the big ones
(EFX, and MCFORMATS) are pretty well complete, I think.

OpenAL-Soft continues to make progress.  I'm not sure where Creative is
on its road map these days, though.  The OSX implementation is updated
with each OS revision, I think.

> Perhaps more experienced programmers could assure me that it's not
> that bad as I think it looks. But I'm very eager to hear some opinions
> on this, before I start getting a lot of openAL code into my project.
>  

I think OpenAL is getting used by a fair number of projects.  Some
players in the game industry still use it (at least as one option).  
It's true that there hasn't been any progress in the spec for a while,
although several extensions have been proposed and some have been
implemented recently (Chris can talk about this better than me).

I wouldn't give up on OpenAL yet.  Just out of curiosity, what other
solutions have you considered, and why?

--"J"
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[Yvan Vander Sanden]

2009/4/27 Jason Daly <jdaly@...>:

>  If you look, though the download links do have the newest implementations
> available, including OpenAL-Soft 1.7, which was just released last month, I
> believe.

I see you're right. Apparently, the 'recent changes' page doesn't
include everything.

> There's no reason not to trust OpenAL-Soft.  It's quite simply the best
> software implementation available.  It started with Creative's original
> software implementation for Windows, to which Chris has added quite a number
> of enhancements.
>
> As to the risk, even if Chris stops working on it, the code is open-source,
> so if you ever run into any problems with it, you're free to dive in and fix
> it.

I'm familiar with the concept of open source, yes :-) But still,
projects maintained by one man are always vulnerable. Of course I am
allowed to make changes myself, but I'm just an artist with some
limited programming skills. Making a program when you can depend on
good libraries to make the things you don't understand a lot easier is
one thing, but tackling that library itself is quite another. I would
depend on the possibility that other people also want to keep using
the library and decide to work on it. I'm using Linux for almost 10
years now, and I've seen quite a lot of abandoned software in that
time.

That said, I certainly agree with you that OpenAL-Soft is a very good
implementation and Chris does deserve a lot of credit for that.

> Have you tried the latest X-Fi drivers for Linux (the 1.0 release)?  I have
> no idea why they were shipped so silently, but they seem to have addressed
> just about every problem I ever had with them.  I downloaded them, followed
> the instructions, and they just worked (even on Fedora 10 64-bit), no quirky
> installation, no clunky recompiling, no problems loading the modules.  I was
> quite surprised, and very pleased.
>
> Don't go to the old Beta site, go to the regular Creative Labs driver
> download site.  The latest driver was released November of 2008.

Interesting. I tried that driver on Ubuntu 8.10 and I did not even
recognize my card. Felt a bit cheated because I especially checked if
there were Linux drivers, before I bought it. I'll ask you some
questions about that in a personal mail if you don't mind, because
it's not really related to this list anyway.

>> Of course OpenAL as such is an open standard, but programming can't do
>> with standards alone, it needs a library, good documentation and not
>> in the least progress.
>
> What documentation are you missing?  The core spec is pretty complete.  A
> lot of the extensions could be documented better, but the big ones (EFX, and
> MCFORMATS) are pretty well complete, I think.

Nothing really :-) I expressed myself badly. I meant that an open
standard as such doesn't guaranty a continued development. But
actually this part of my question was not that relevant after all, i
think.

> I wouldn't give up on OpenAL yet.  Just out of curiosity, what other
> solutions have you considered, and why?

Well, I thought about irrKlang because I'm also using irrlicht as a
graphics engine. They are closely related so that might be a benefit.
On the other hand, IrrKlang and irrlicht make it very easy for
developers, but at a cost of what is possible. For the graphic part I
don't mind because the visuals are nothing more than an addition to
the sound in my project. But for the sound that could be a problem. I
want to have a virtual sound environment where i can alter every
aspect to do things that are not possible in reality, as opposed to
just imitate that reality.

I also looked at FMOD. It has very interesting features (like wall
reflections!), but 2 things worry me. Firstly it's not open source.
And secondly, although there are lots of examples added to the
download, there isn't an API reference or some clearly organized
information about the library. I hate to go through dozens of examples
to find what I need, every time I want to work on my program.

In that perspective OpenAL still seems the best option. I think I just
need some reassurement before I start.

Regards,

yvan vander sanden

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[Jason Daly]

Yvan Vander Sanden wrote:
> I'm familiar with the concept of open source, yes :-)

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound patronizing :-)

I certainly understand your concern here.  Sometimes the traffic on the
list is so slow, that I wonder if anyone is actually there myself.  Even
so, I've been involved for more than 10 years now, and there are still
improvements being made.  Slowly for sure, but steadily.


> Interesting. I tried that driver on Ubuntu 8.10 and I did not even
> recognize my card. Felt a bit cheated because I especially checked if
> there were Linux drivers, before I bought it. I'll ask you some
> questions about that in a personal mail if you don't mind, because
> it's not really related to this list anyway.
>  

Sure, feel free.

--"J"
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[Sven Panne]

[ OK, this is *really* getting off-topic, but I guess this is the best place
for such a thread, anyway... ]

Am Montag, 27. April 2009 23:34:12 schrieb Jason Daly:

> [...]
> Have you tried the latest X-Fi drivers for Linux (the 1.0 release)?  I
> have no idea why they were shipped so silently, but they seem to have
> addressed just about every problem I ever had with them.  I downloaded
> them, followed the instructions, and they just worked (even on Fedora 10
> 64-bit), no quirky installation, no clunky recompiling, no problems
> loading the modules.  I was quite surprised, and very pleased.
>
> Don't go to the old Beta site, go to the regular Creative Labs driver
> download site.  The latest driver was released November of 2008. [...]

Well, to be honest, that driver release was a big disappointment for me. It
didn't work out of the box for me, either. After inspecting the kernel log and
fiddling around with "lspci -v" I found that I had to patch the driver for my
X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion:

----------------------------------------------------------
--- XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00/ctdrv.h 2008-10-30 09:19:02.000000000 +0100
+++ drivers/XFiDrv/XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00/ctdrv.h  2009-01-11
12:11:04.000000000 +0100
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
 #define PCI_DEVICE_CREATIVE_20K2       0x000B
 #define PCI_SUBVENDOR_CREATIVE         0x1102
 #define PCI_SUBSYS_CREATIVE_SB0760     0x0024
-#define PCI_SUBSYS_CREATIVE_SB0880     0x0041
+#define PCI_SUBSYS_CREATIVE_SB0880     0x0043
 #define PCI_SUBSYS_CREATIVE_HENDRIX    0x6000

 #define CT_XFI_DMA_MASK                        0xffffffffUL /* 32 bits */
----------------------------------------------------------

After that, the card works, but only in a very, very basic way. I see only a
few inputs and only stereo output, the front module is not working at all,
etc. Are there any hints to make the card more functional under Linux? Even my
crappy onboard chip works in 5.1 mode out-of-the box... :-(

Cheers,
   S.

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[Jason Daly]

Sven Panne wrote:
> After that, the card works, but only in a very, very basic way. I see only a
> few inputs and only stereo output, the front module is not working at all,
> etc. Are there any hints to make the card more functional under Linux? Even my
> crappy onboard chip works in 5.1 mode out-of-the box... :-(
>  

Hi, Sven,  It's been a while!

It worked right out of the gate on FC10 for me.  It also installed way,
way easier than the previous two releases.  Maybe I'm in better shape
because I have an original X-Fi Platinum.  I have to admit that I
haven't had time to check whether I can get multi-channel audio or not.  
I actually haven't used my home machine much lately.

What's really interesting to me is how the driver has been received by
the open source community.  After all of the whining and complaining
that the open source driver community has done in the past about binary
blob drivers, Creative has finally released a fully open source driver
for the X-Fi (maybe it's not feature-complete, but the source is all
there for people to hack on, and data sheets have been released to the
community as well).  This happened in November, so it's been six months.

I find it really confusing that the driver still hasn't made it into the
ALSA project (not even a whisper about it on the lists).  Even if it's
not ready for the newer hardware, it could at least be put into the
repository.  I've also heard that the OSS driver is not functioning that
well for many people, and this driver came out even earlier.  After all
of the complaints and assurances that if the driver were open-sourced,
it would be better, it seems to be going nowhere.

I acknowledge that there could be a legitimate issue that's holding up
development, but I haven't been able to find any discussions about this
on any lists or forums.  If anyone is in the know about this, can you
explain what's going on?

--"J"
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[Yvan Vander Sanden]

2009/5/4 Jason Daly <jdaly@...>:
> Sven Panne wrote:
>>
>> After that, the card works, but only in a very, very basic way. I see only
>> a few inputs and only stereo output, the front module is not working at all,
>> etc.

Well, if it's only stereo, i'm not even going to bother installing it.
It's the surround i need.  I bought this card because there was an
open source driver on the creative website. If they'd mentioned 'we
have a linux driver available but it doesn't work very good and not on
every card' I would not have bought that card. So I feel a bit tricked
about that.

> What's really interesting to me is how the driver has been received by the
> open source community.  After all of the whining and complaining that the
> open source driver community has done in the past about binary blob drivers,
> Creative has finally released a fully open source driver for the X-Fi (maybe
> it's not feature-complete, but the source is all there for people to hack
> on, and data sheets have been released to the community as well).  This
> happened in November, so it's been six months.

Now that's not really fair. But it's still creative that promised to
support Linux since the card was around. After 2 years, they come up
with a driver that works only on some 64 bit systems and is not very
good. Half a year later, there's a half baked open source driver on
their website and information has been passed to the community. And
then, suddenly, it's not Creative's fault anymore that there isn't a
decent driver, but the open source community??

I don't know what is going on either. But it's a matter of
responsibility. If you give some information to a group of volunteers
that's great, but it does not bind them to do the work in your place.
The better if they do, but it's still the company (creative) that
promised to provide a linux driver.

Regards,

yvan



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[Matias D'Ambrosio]

On Monday 04 May 2009 12:20:35 Jason Daly wrote:

>
> What's really interesting to me is how the driver has been received by
> the open source community.  After all of the whining and complaining
> that the open source driver community has done in the past about binary
> blob drivers, Creative has finally released a fully open source driver
> for the X-Fi (maybe it's not feature-complete, but the source is all
> there for people to hack on, and data sheets have been released to the
> community as well).  This happened in November, so it's been six months.
>
> I find it really confusing that the driver still hasn't made it into the
> ALSA project (not even a whisper about it on the lists).  Even if it's
> not ready for the newer hardware, it could at least be put into the
> repository.  I've also heard that the OSS driver is not functioning that
> well for many people, and this driver came out even earlier.  After all
> of the complaints and assurances that if the driver were open-sourced,
> it would be better, it seems to be going nowhere.

 I found this link (in a very non-obvious way):

http://support.creative.com/downloads/download.aspx?nDownloadId=10792

There is an EULA that must be accepted to download that says:

6. No Merger or Integration
You may not merge any portion of the Software into, or integrate any portion
of the Software with, any other program, except to the extent expressly
permitted by the laws of the jurisdiction where you are located. Any portion
of the Software merged into or integrated with another program, if any, will
continue to be subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, and you
must reproduce on the merged or integrated portion all copyright and other
proprietary rights notices included on the originals of the Software.

9. Limitations on Using, Copying, and Modifying the Software
Except to the extent expressly permitted by this Agreement or by the laws of
the jurisdiction where you acquired the Software, you may not use, copy or
modify the Software. Nor may you sub-license any of your rights under this
Agreement. You may use the Software for your personal use only, and not for
public performance or for the creation of publicly displayed videotapes.

10. Decompiling, Disassembling, or Reverse Engineering
You acknowledge that the Software contains trade secrets and other proprietary
information of Creative and its licensors. Except to the extent expressly
permitted by this Agreement or by the laws of the jurisdiction where you are
located, you may not decompile, disassemble or otherwise reverse engineer the
Software, or engage in any other activities to obtain underlying information
that is not visible to the user in connection with normal use of the
Software.

In particular, you agree not for any purpose to transmit the Software or
display the Software's object code on any computer screen or to make any
hardcopy memory dumps of the Software's object code. If you believe you
require information related to the interoperability of the Software with
other programs, you shall not decompile or disassemble the Software to obtain
such information, and you agree to request such information from Creative at
the address listed below. Upon receiving such a request, Creative shall
determine whether you require such information for a legitimate purpose and,
if so, Creative will provide such information to you within a reasonable time
and on reasonable conditions.

In any event, you will notify Creative of any information derived from reverse
engineering or such other activities, and the results thereof will constitute
the confidential information of Creative that may be used only in connection
with the Software.



 Is that the fully open source driver? The announcement mentions 1.18 but I
only found the 1.00 version for download, and with a non-OSS EULA. I haven't
seen the datasheets but I haven't looked too hard either, I admit; Creative's
websites' are awkward to use (including the openal section).
 Even the announcement promises less than even the most basic onboard
soundcard, so it's no surprise that X-fi cards are in the category "avoid
like the plague" in the OSS world (which consists of more than Linux).
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[Yvan Vander Sanden]

> I can understand feeling tricked, but I don't believe Creative ever said
> anything about supporting Linux.  Every driver release was pretty
> clearly marked as an "Unsupported" driver.  I'm not saying I don't want
> them to support it better, but I don't think there was any deception
> involved.  Heck, a quick scan of the forum or mailing lists should have
> warned you ahead of time  :-)

You see unsupported drivers for linux quite a lot. So if I check for
an available driver on the companies website before I buy the
hardware, that's now not enough anymore. I should also check forums to
see if the announced driver is actually any good. Ok, I'll have to
remind that.

> Creative never promised anything of the kind.  I've met a couple of the
> Creative folks personally, and there was never any business decision
> made to support Linux.


The internet archive shows otherwise. Of course you won't see the
announcement nowadays, but they promised one in 2006.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061214142854/http://opensource.creative.com/




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[Jason Daly]

Yvan Vander Sanden wrote:

You see unsupported drivers for linux quite a lot. So if I check for
an available driver on the companies website before I buy the
hardware, that's now not enough anymore. I should also check forums to
see if the announced driver is actually any good. Ok, I'll have to
remind that.
  

I can hear your sarcasm  :-)  Still, unsupported means exactly that.  You're buying at your own risk.

It's good practice to get feedback on any device and support before making a purchase, even with a Windows product.  I've had terrible experiences with things like video capture cards (particularly with the lack of quality drivers).  This problem isn't limited to Linux (although I agree it does seem to occur far more often there).

Creative never promised anything of the kind.  I've met a couple of the
Creative folks personally, and there was never any business decision
made to support Linux.
    

The internet archive shows otherwise. Of course you won't see the
announcement nowadays, but they promised one in 2006.

http://web.archive.org/web/20061214142854/http://opensource.creative.com/
  

They announced a driver, but there was never any promise or guarantee of full, commercial support for it.  Even when I read that announcement, I never expected anywhere near the support that the Windows drivers and apps get.  To think otherwise would be naive to me.  Maybe I've just been at this long enough to know what to expect, so when things like this happen I'm not so disappointed as newer folks might be.

I know what you're saying, though.  Like most people, I was disappointed at what was eventually provided (especially the fact that no native OpenAL implementation ever came out).  Most likely what happened is that they underestimated the scope of the task (writing a full-featured driver for hardware that complex has to be a big job).  This is probably why the driver was late, and when it did finally come out, it was severely lacking (x64 and 2.4 kernels only, among other things).

Commercial support for Linux drivers is unfortunately hard to come by.  Nvidia doesn't officially support their graphics drivers in Linux either (even though their support is generally pretty good).  It'll be a long time before this changes.  Maybe you understand why I'm rooting so much for the open-source driver now  :-)

--"J"


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