AeonWave: An Open-Source Audio Engine Akin To Microsoft's XAudio2 / Apple CoreAudio

An open-source audio initiative that's been in development for years but flying under our radar until its lead developer chimed in is AeonWave, which supports Windows and Linux systems while being inspired by Microsoft XAudio and Apple's CoreAudio.

Erik Hofman of Adalin B.V. who develops AeonWave describes the project to us as:

An open source audio engine much like XAudio2/XAudio3D by Microsoft or CoreAudio from Apple. So it is not intended to replace either libasound or pulseaudio. Instead AeonWave started out as a completely new and fast implementation of OpenAL long before OpenAL-Soft was created. I kept working on improving it through the years and at some point, while writing the audio engine for FlightGear, decided that OpenAL just doesn't cut it and rewrote the engine into the core engine and a small OpenAL emulation layer. Taking into account the lessons learned from the sound engine created for FlightGear and all with rendering speed in mind.

These days AeonWave supports sub-mixing in stereo mode and in 3D/4D mode in which case repositioning the sub-mixer automatically re-positions and re-orientates all registered objects. It supports assigning an unlimited number of filter and effects to an unlimited number of sound emitters, the sub-mixers and the final mixer. It supports automatically streaming from internet streams or audio hardware, and positioning it in the 3d environment. And is contains a full synthesizer which can be configured with just a few lines of XML code in a configuration file which may be located locally or can be retrieved from the internet by AeonWave. For testing purposes a small MIDI playback utility was developed recently and added to the aax-utils package. MIDI playback revealed a number of unexpected problems with the code which now have been resolved.

This cross-platform 3D/4D sound engine in its newest releases has landed a number of performance improvements and other optimizations.

Those wishing to learn more about this open-source sound engine can do so at Adalin.com.