It will be addressed, but in the medium range. We have not yet made up our mind which sound library we should use when we go away from DirectSound. There is one library that is really good, but won't give us a license. All the suggestions are relatively easy to implement, but I don't want to implement them before the change.

fmod? bass?

i'd love to see enabling the fx of directSound first. why not? whats so bad about directSound?

As this seems to gain some brain storming character I'd like to throw in an additional idea. I'd love to see two functions, tha first one returning how many audio channels are used and the second one how many audio channels are available.

I think the GS audio system doesn't work with channels... otherwise we would have REALLY cool features.. like in every other sound engine

Ello: The problem with DirectSound is that the latest version (DS8) does not support stereo sounds in 3D. Of course, stereo sounds can not be played anyway in 3D, but DS7 played them in mono while DS8 just crashes. Sound effects require DS8, but many users have stereo sounds in their games, and that was what prevented us from going to DS8 from DS7. Of course we could work around the the problem, but we thought that it would not worth the hassle.

Uhrwerk: You can check the number of available channels through the snd_playing() function. The sound handle is just an int that is increased by 1 every time a sound is played. So when using the handle from the last sound and counting it down to zero you can get the number of playing channels. The maximum is 32 channels.

In which audio engine are you interested in? You said you are looking for some already existent engines..

Now that's some usefull information. Thank you, jcl.