SoX vs OpenAL performance/overhead

Question

Both has bindings for C, both can play various formats.

Which one is more superior? in terms of simplicity, performance, overhead and memory footprint.

Also which one is better at handling multiple streams?

Answer 1

I have not programmed with either of those, but I believe that OpenAL has been designed to render and output multiple-channel audio for games, with real-time performance as a requirement.

libSoX is more for input and output from audio files, as well as for format conversions. There are lots of plugins but AFAIK it has not been designed for real-time audio output. It seems significantly simpler to use, though.

You might also want to have a look at libsndfile.

What exactly is it that you want to do?

Answer 2

While I have never used OpenAL, I've heard a lot of bad things about it that make it sound unprofessional and basically a dead end. From Wikipedia:

OpenAL was originally developed by Loki Software in order to help them in their business of porting Windows games to Linux. After the demise of Loki, the project was maintained for a time by the free software/open source community, and implemented on NVIDIA nForce sound cards and motherboards. It is now hosted (and largely developed) by Creative Technology with on-going support from Apple, Blue Ripple Sound, and free software/open source enthusiasts.

While the OpenAL charter says that there will be an "Architecture Review Board" (ARB) modeled on the OpenGL ARB, no such organization has ever been formed and the OpenAL specification is generally handled and discussed via email on its public mailing list.

Since 1.1, the implementation by Creative has turned proprietary, with the last releases in free licenses still accessible through the project's subversion. However, OpenAL Soft is a widespread Open Source alternative.

There was also an issue with it messing up the state of the calling application; I believe just linking it caused some global constructors to run before the invocation of main in a way that altered the program's initial environment, and broke some programs (MPlayer perhaps?). It's unclear to me whether this issue was ever fixed, but it screams bad library and I would be skeptical of ever trusting a library historically contained such abuses.