# The SL Sound and Mixer Libraries.

By Steve Baker

## Introduction.

The 'SL' sound library is primarily targetted towards producing sound effects for games, and isn't really intended for playing music (although you could certainly use it for doing that). The emphasis is on low CPU impact and low latency rather than high quality and fancy MIDI/MOD facilities.

SL is a part of PLIB.

The 'SL' sound library will eventually become a fully portable freeware sound library that should run on all major platforms. Right now, SL runs under:

- Linux on systems with OSS (the Open Sound System) installed (it's usually a standard part of the kernel).
- Windows NT, 95 and 98.
- OpenBSD.
- SGI's IRIX.
- Other UNIX systems using OSS (which should include Solaris, FreeBSD, BSD/OS, SCO and others) should be able to run the Linux version of SL by adding '-DSL_USING_OSS_AUDIO' to the compile command line.

At present, there is no support for Apple's MacOS sound systems - although it is hoped that these will be added in the near future.

- The SL Library deals with all aspects of sample replay for games and other realtime applications - it is designed such that it can be ported to other operating systems by replacing just the slDSP class.

- The SM Library controls the audio mixer on a PC sound card and probably only works 100% correctly within OSS - and then probably only on fairly 'vanilla' Soundblaster-compatible sound cards. Portability of SM is patchy - regard it as a bonus.

It is due to the relative non-portability of the SM routines that these are in a separate library. For non-portable applications, SL and SM can be considered as a single library.

Download the Open Sound System drivers (previously known as VoxWare).