sound object passthrough (spatial audio) for pipewire

[rhjdvsgsgks]

hi

pipewire are drafting a api to allow sound object creation by application. could you please provide some comment for them? many thanks

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/3035

[rhjdvsgsgks]

may related #586

[kcat]

As far as OpenAL Soft goes, I don't expect to fully support spatial audio systems, beyond using them for a static virtual channel bed (e.g. have OpenAL Soft output a 7.1(.4(.4)) mix, or B-Format if it supports that, and leave it to play that on the user's speaker setup). Having individual sources output as dynamic objects instead of being mixed together would be difficult since OpenAL Soft is designed as a highly portable software mixer. It wouldn't be impossible, presuming I knew how to output to such a system, but the library isn't designed for doing that and would introduce limitations it didn't have to worry about before.

More generally, I'm not too sure how much I can help their API design, since I don't really know how object-based audio systems (Atmos, etc) work. The only experience I have is playing around with the WASAPI Spatial Audio API (to output a static virtual channel bed), and implementing a simple player for the LAF file format, which while that may offer some insight, doesn't really say what kind of design is needed.