3d Game Sound

Games and simulations rely greatly on sound and music to provide atmosphere. While we often focus on graphics as programmers, sound is at least as important to developing an immersive atmosphere.

FMOD - Windows, Mac, Linux, WinCE, PS2, XBox, GameCube; Commercial, but free for non-commercial use. From their web page: "FMOD supports 3d sound, midi, mods, mp3, ogg vorbis, wma, aiff, recording, obstruction/occlusion, cd playback (analog or digital), cd ripping, mmx, internet streaming, dsp effects, spectrum analysis, user created samples and streams, synchronization support, ASIO, EAX 2&3, C/C++/VB/Delphi and more."

OpenAL - Windows, Mac, Linux, PS2, XBox, GameCube; Mainly free under LGPL but commercial for some platforms. From the web page: "OpenAL is a cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications."

BASS - Windows; Commercial, but free for non-commercial use. From the web page: "BASS is an audio library for use in Windows software. It's purpose is to provide developers with the most powerful and efficient (yet easy to use), sample, stream (MP3, MP2, MP1, OGG, WAV, custom generated, and more via add-ons), MOD music (XM, IT, S3M, MOD, MTM, UMX), MO3 music (MP3/OGG compressed MODs), and recording functions. All in a tiny DLL, under 100KB in size."

Audiere - Windows, *nix; Free "Audiere is a high-level audio API. It can play Ogg Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, uncompressed WAV, AIFF, MOD, S3M, XM, and IT files. For audio output, Audiere supports DirectSound or WinMM in Windows, OSS on Linux and Cygwin, and SGI AL on IRIX." Featuring a Brain-dead easy API.