> On 4 Dec 2014, at 8:09 pm, Richard Hughes <[email protected]> wrote:
>> has anybody done an assessment of the similarities between DirectSound
>> and canberra? how do these API map to each other? can we do a layer
>> that is the minimal intersection between the two (and whatever MacOS
>> has) and still be useful?
> 
> That is a good question and one I'm not qualified to answer. Anyone?
> 

From what I understand, DirectSound and GSound aren’t at all comparable; 
DirectSound is a low-level 3-d audio API along the lines of ALSA or OpenAL, 
whereas GSound is a higher-level API which calls into this layer (via 
libcanberra). What would need to happen is for GSound (or rather, libcanberra) 
to gain a DirectSound/CoreAudio backend. Canberra already has multiple backends 
(selectable at runtime), and ships with Pulse, ALSA and GStreamer drivers — in 
principle, the GStreamer driver could be used on Windows and Mac OS, although 
obviously that's a rather heavyweight dependency.

Alternatively, a few minutes of Googling has turned up that Mac OS has its own 
high level sound playing API, coincidentally called NSSound[0], which has a 
broadly similar focus. So it might be possible for GSound (or GTK) to use 
NSSound on the Mac. I don’t know whether Windows also has a similar high-level 
“just play this sound and I don’t care how” API, but I’ll do some research.

Tristan


[0] 
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSSound_Class/index.html
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