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Soundly is a small library in development which extends slick-util's sound functionality.

Primary aims:
- Further control over individual OpenAL sources.
- Further control over the OpenAL listener: its position, orientation, etc.
- Management of OpenAL sources based on priority, distance from listener, etc.

Why manage sources?
When you play a sound with OpenAL (i.e. with Slick2D or LWJGL), the sound relies on a "source". Depending on the machine and platform, you are often limited to work with a low number of sources. (The iPhone, for example, generally supports 32 sources with OpenAL -- i.e. 32 simultaneous sounds.)

With a flurry of gunshots, musical elements, voice-overs, footsteps, environment sounds, etc. it's easy to start racking up the sources. And when we reach this limit (Slick2D defaults to 64 sources), there are no more sound that can be played -- at least not until some of the action dies down!

In most games, by the time we have that many sources playing at once, the user won't notice if we remove some of the superfluous sounds (e.g. bird chirps, footstep) to make way for something that might be more important (another gunshot, a speech element, etc).

In comes Soundly. You define the importance of a Sound and let the sound manager handle the rest -- sounds will be swapped out based on priority, distance from listener, etc.

(Note: Soundly is in VERY early stages, and is subject to change.)

Links
Home page:
http://code.google.com/p/slick-soundly/

Source:
http://slick-soundly.googlecode.com/svn ... undly/src/

Documentation:
http://code.google.com/p/slick-soundly/w/list



EDIT: Updated, completely refactored, removed superfluous interfaces, added "Mix" class for easy mixing of volumes/panning/etc., added the ability of groups within groups

EDIT2: This project is being put on hold for the time being.

sorry but webstart is not working, see here

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Oops, I meant to remove that from SVN.

Use the executable JARs if you want to try the examples without compiling.

A lot of updates and refactoring:


Check out the wiki for details:
http://code.google.com/p/slick-soundly/ ... edFeatures

Do you have plans on including support for Slick2d LoadingList and DeferredResource loading of XSound?

Yep, definitely on my todo list.

This looks really nice, I think I can use this for music boxes or something

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Thanks.

I've been using this version of Soundly with some tests and it suits its purpose. However, I'd like to ultimately build Soundly into a LWJGL (rather than Slick-based) audio engine.

My ambitious todo list... Ultimately I would like to see this workable with Slick, JMonkeyEngine, etc.




Edit: Been doing some more work on it.
I've reworked Soundly to use Paul Lamb's SoundSystem as a base instead of slick-util: this means you can pick and choose which libraries to use (LWJGL, JavaSound, JOAL) as well as which codecs (JOrbis, JOgg, Wav, IBXM). And while slick-util only supported OGG streaming, you can now stream with any supported codec.

It also opens the doors to reverb/lowpass/etc. on Mac OSX -- while EFX (OpenAL effects) is not supported, JavaSound should work fine.

I'm planning on using XML to parse sound definitions, it might look something like this:

I'm not sure if you are still reading this but what happened to your Soundly library? It's not going to get any update or do you have the LWJGL version? I've started using this a few weeks ago and the features Soundly offer bring great improvement to my game.

So far, the library is working like a charm but are there any features left out uncompleted when you stopped developing or any thing to take care of if I were to keep using the library? like are there known issues?

sorry for lots of questions.

edit: forgot to say "thank you" for making Soundly :p

I would like to see more of this too I would even to it myself if I had more time (I pretty happy I could some time to learn TWL, checked 1 of 1000 Things on my "To-Learn"-List).

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Glad to hear Soundly is working out.

My last "update" ended up turning into a complete refactor, and now I'm planning to put it into a different library altogether (think Slick-Util but with modern OpenGL, a more powerful texture/audio API, and a sprite renderer). So I probably won't be updating Soundly. What features/updates are you looking for?

If you ever run into bugs with the current problem, I can probably help sort them out.

Looking forward to your new library, hope it can be used with slick xD

I haven't ran into any problem with Soundly so far, mainly I'm using it for playing ambient sounds and using distant radius feature and fading volume. Also planning to replace slick's Music class with Soundly for my game now. Was just wondering if there's any class you shouldn't be using or wanted to know if there were any known issues.

It's stable in my game so I guess I keep using it

Nope, sorry. And the API/design is mainly "OpenGL-like" as opposed to "Java2D-like." Shaders, texture arrays, framebuffer objects, etc.


For the most part Soundly just relies on Slick for audio decoding and streaming, which means that any problems with Slick audio will also crop up in Soundly:
- OGG files less than 4KB will give errors (note: at that size you should use WAV)
- Can't stream anything other than OGG
- Seeking may not work
- Music is streamed on the same thread as your game, i.e. be weary of that and don't go crazy streaming more tracks than necessary

It was programmed as I was first learning OpenAL, and I used Slick's source as a reference (which admittedly was a poor idea).

What I'm looking for is the following:

• Channels or what you discribed as SoundGroups. So I can put 2 ogg files together and play them fading on channel to make the music less aggressive
• pitch, volume, speed and all the stuff you said
• deffered loading
• looping while streaming (I know you made that possible for me but in a nice API it would be awsome too I guess )

Sound is just really important to me. I'm a huge fan of dynamic music like in Jak II & III, SSX and the Zelda series

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Current Projects:
Mr. Hat I
Vegan Vs. Zombies
Projects:
RadicalFish Engine - Build on top of Slick2D, Ideas, Bugs? Open an Issue ticket!