ALUT 1.0.1

At time of writing (August 2005), ALUT was a set of undocumented semi-portable functions that were mixed up in the OpenAL library distribution. The intent had always been that ALUT would be a cleanly separated library that would be portable between systems.

It was hoped that it would be well suited to producing succinct demo programs and to help new developers to get started with OpenAL. It was to do this by removing the annoying details of getting an audio application started - allowing developers to learn OpenAL without distractions such as loading sound samples from disk.

In order to move from this initial implementation to a clean API that would meet the original goals of ALUT, it was necessary to break from the past and make a clean start. The original version(s) were unnumbered - so we will arbitarily label all previous versions as 0.x.x and start this cleaned up version at release 1.0.0 to reflect changed API and implementations.

About OpenAL:

OpenAL is a cross-platform 3D audio API appropriate for use with gaming applications and many other types of audio applications.

The library models a collection of audio sources moving in a 3D space that are heard by a single listener somewhere in that space. The basic OpenAL objects are a Listener, a Source, and a Buffer. There can be a large number of Buffers, which contain audio data.

Each buffer can be attached to one or more Sources, which represent points in 3D space which are emitting audio. There is always one Listener object (per audio context), which represents the position where the sources are heard -- rendering is done from the perspective of the Listener.