I find sound libraries are fun and interesting to create as you pretty much have instant satisfaction with them. As for packing libraries, you might want to check out PhysicsFS before you start the design of yours. I haven't really done much using it, but Evolutional lives by it.

Are you going to implement sampled audio streaming?

It is pretty handy if you want to play sampled audio music which can be very large if you open them all into memory at once.

Thanks Rob. I don't think I'll use it because of the license and I don't need all of the file formats that it supports etiher. Also I'll be using the packer to protect my resources from crooked fingers so I'd rather keep the implementation to myself.

Quote: Are you going to implement sampled audio streaming?
It is pretty handy if you want to play sampled audio music which can be very large if you open them all into memory at once.

I hadn't considered streaming and I probably won't until I need to. [smile] Do you know of any articles that cover directx and streaming?

not off the top of my head =/
it is pretty complicated =(

the basic idea is that you:

1. open a file stream via your favorite file io method
2. create a 2 second(or more) sound buffer
3. set notification points (and the EVENT objects) at half and end
4. create a thread which waits on the events
5. fill the entire buffer
6. play the buffer
7. wait until it reaches half spot, then fill the first half again with new data
8. wait until it reaches end spot then fill the second half with new data
9. continue doing this until you are out of data

This way you only have 2 seconds of audio in ram at any one time.

DirectSound (at least in version 7) seemed to like you to use threads and HEVENT objects, which can make the programming tricky.

it also requires that you have a loader which can properly give you n-bytes of data on demand from disk.

I think with some work you can get a 'polling' system working just as well, which would allow you to drop the threads and etc.

Well thanks for the outline. I'm not going to be using heavy sounds anyway. If I want something that advanced then I'll just use an existing sound library instead of trying to create one. Sound is just something I really don't like programming.

[edit]So why do I keep reading over your entry? hmmmm I wonder if...
No! Must keep schedule. Maybe I'll come back to it.