Epic Games' Ryan Gordon, responsible for the port of many of the most popular PC titles to the Mac platform, recently unleashed his very own implementation of OpenAL, a popular cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications.

Gordon's build features a number of improvements from OpenAL.org's implementation, among which we highlight:

• Speed. This is currently the fastest AL implementation for OSX, even counting the new CoreAudio support in openal.org's CVS.
  
• Contains optimizations for Altivec-enabled systems, but has scalar fallbacks for G3 and older systems.
  
• Is designed with multithreading in mind...should be 100% thread safe, and can take advantage of multiple CPU systems internally.
  
• Can handle multiple contexts on multiple devices, all running in parallel.
  
• Supports the AL_ENUMERATION_EXT extension for device enumeration.
  
• Supports AL_EXT_vorbis for direct playback of Ogg Vorbis audio; the Vorbis decoder is a highly optimized and Altivec-enabled fork of xiph.org's libvorbis-1.0...using this extension can be significantly faster and easier for the application than using a stock libvorbis and buffer queueing.

For more information on this implementation, be sure to check Ryan's web site through the link provided below.

Inside Mac Games (add to watch list)

Ryan Gordon's OpenAL

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