[geeks] Cross platform sound programming

[Joshua D Boyd]

Right, so I need to be able to do simple sound programming on linux and
windows (basically only the ability to play music and several sound
effects at once is needed).

So, I tried to pitch the professor on SDL instead of
Glut+libtiff+libjpeg+custom TGA&BMP&PCX code+unknown sound lib.  But
that was a no go, so I've been looking for sound libraries that will
work with glut (which basically means not being depedent on some other
gui toolkit) on both windows and linux.  

I thought that audiere might be a good choice, but they are screwy on
linux (wierd obsession about making FLAC a requirement instead of
optional, and on top of it, I can't make them compile with the libflac I
have installed), despite working nicely on windows (revelation ensued
when I checked out the lead programmers site and found that he uses
windows and only boots dead rat when fealing adventurous).

So, now I've moved on an am looking at OpenAL.  The linux version( and
BeOS, etc) version can only be gotten from CVS, but windows can be
gotten precompiled.  In the middle of trying to compile for linux right
now.  Lots, and I mean lots, of errors.  So far not promising.

Any other suggestions?

PS. Here is a developing pet peave of mine.  I've been trying to do as
close to the sane thing as possible in this class.  To that goal, I've
been trying to use free libraries as much as possible rather than
recoding things.  But, I have been through so many bloody versions of
some libraries (particularly libtiff and libjpeg) trying to find
versions that will place nice together.  And I haven't even gotten to
trying to set up deadrat's pthreads package yet.  This is really pissing
me off.  Half my copious amounts of time in the lab at school is spent
library wrangling.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd