1. Overview

I am currently, as I write this document, a programmer for Raytheon. There I do all sorts of communications, network, GUI, and other general programming tasks in C/C++ on the Solaris and sometimes Linux Operating Systems. I have been programming sound code in my free time for only a little while now. Sound is an integral part to any game. The human senses are mostly starved during video game play. there's only some tactile feedback on some controlers, and of course the eyes are in use but only for about 30% of their viewing area. So to add more we do need sound to help the game player feel more in the action, and to set certain moods as the game progresses. Sound ends up accounting for perhaps 50% or more of a gamers experience. Music and sound effects are all integral parts of the gaming experience. While this document doesn't explain how to get music and samples to use, it will explain how to use them with SDL_mixer.

Feel free to contact me: JonathanCAtkins@gmail.com

I am also usually on IRC at irc.freenode.net in the #SDL channel as LIM

This is the README in the SDL_mixer source archive.

SDL_mixer 1.2 The latest version of this library is available from: SDL_mixer Homepage Due to popular demand, here is a simple multi-channel audio mixer. It supports 8 channels of 16 bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music, mixed by the popular MikMod MOD, Timidity MIDI and SMPEG MP3 libraries. See the header file SDL_mixer.h and the examples playwave.c and playmus.c for documentation on this mixer library. The mixer can currently load Microsoft WAVE files and Creative Labs VOC files as audio samples, and can load MIDI files via Timidity and the following music formats via MikMod: .MOD .S3M .IT .XM. It can load Ogg Vorbis streams as music if built with the Ogg Vorbis libraries, and finally it can load MP3 music using the SMPEG library. The process of mixing MIDI files to wave output is very CPU intensive, so if playing regular WAVE files sound great, but playing MIDI files sound choppy, try using 8-bit audio, mono audio, or lower frequencies. To play MIDI files, you'll need to get a complete set of GUS patches from: Timidity GUS Patches and unpack them in /usr/local/lib under UNIX, and C:\ under Win32. This library is available under the GNU Library General Public License, see the file "COPYING" for details.