libao 0.8.6

Libao is a cross-platform audio library that allows programs to output audio using a simple API on a wide variety of platforms.
Libao began life as cross-platform audio library inside of ac3dec, an AC3 decoder by Aaron Holtzman that is part of the LiViD project. When ogg123 (part of the command line vorbis tools) needed a way to play audio on multiple operating systems, someone on the vorbis-dev mailing list suggested the libao library as a possible way to add cross-platform support to ogg123. Stan Seibert downloaded the libao library, severely
hacked it up in order to make the build process simpler and support multiple live-playback devices. (The original code allowed one live playback driver, the wav driver, and a null driver to be compiled into the library.) Jack Moffitt got it supporting dynamically loaded plugins so that binary versions of libao could be provided.
Main features:
- Null output (handy for testing without a sound device)
- WAV files
- AU files
- OSS (Open Sound System, used on Linux and FreeBSD
- ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture)
- polypaudio (next generation GNOME sound server)
- esd (EsounD or Enlightened Sound Daemon)
- AIX
- Sun/NetBSD/OpenBSD
- IRIX
- NAS (Network Audio Ser
Enhancements:
- New Polypaudio driver (libao-polyp 0.4) contributed by Lennart Poettering
- Use esd_close() in the esd driver
- Broaden sample rate tolerance in the OSS driver for nForce compatibility