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The freealut library

freealut is a free implementation of OpenAL's ALUT standard. See the file AUTHORS for the people involved.

Project status - 2024

This is a slightly-updated version that started from git-svn, hosted at https://github.com/vancegroup/freealut, that contains an updated CMake build system, and a few other minor (build-related) fixes.

I (Rylie) initially created this repository as a user of the library, seeking to more easily browse commit history and to clean up the build system. This repository eventually became the de-facto upstream once the original was taken down.

This project does not see much traffic in terms of pull requests and is essentially "complete" and working as well as it ever did. However, it is also mostly unmaintained: I (Rylie) have moved on, no longer use this, and regretfully have no capacity to meaningfully maintain it going forward.

If you need this project and need changes to it, please consider adopting it.

The remainder of the README follows: first a brief newer section on the CMake build, then the original, fairly obsolete sections, minimally updated.

Building freealut

While the "official" build system of the now-missing upstream may be autotools, that build is sufficiently outdated to require patching on modern Linux operating systems. The CMake build system has been updated to work smoothly on all platforms (tested on Linux and Windows, including cross-building), so I'd recommend using it.

(Instructions for older build systems are still included for completeness.)

This builds just like any other standard CMake build system: see https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/guide/user-interaction/ for generic instructions.

Briefly, here's how to build with CMake via out-of-tree build:

  • Change to the alut dir.
  • Create a dir, eg "build", and change into it.
  • Now (eg.) run:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:STRING="/usr" -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS:STRING="-march=athlon-xp -O2"
make
make install

If you exported your CFLAGS, there is no need to specify them explicitly, as CMake will pick them up.

  • OpenAL should get installed as you got used to it.

You could also use ccmake for a console gui, or the Qt CMake gui. An out-of-source build is recommended. This works on Windows, too, generating a Visual Studio solution for whatever version you like.

Some Tips:

  • If you want more output at compile time, use make VERBOSE=1

  • If you want to install to a different directory (using same prefix), use make install DESTDIR=/foo/bar

  • CMake doesn't has a distclean target by default, so you better really do an out-of-tree build, then you can simply delete its content when you want a distclean... Furthermore it is easier to have different builds using different parameters via out-of-tree builds.

Building and installing on *nix-alikes using autotools (deprecated)

To build and run ALUT, you need an OpenAL somewhere (and a sound card, of course :-). If OpenAL is not installed in a standard place (let's say ${OPENAL_PREFIX}) you'll have to tell the build system about it:

CPPFLAGS="-I${OPENAL_PREFIX}/include"
LDFLAGS="-L${OPENAL_PREFIX}/lib"
export CPPFLAGS LDFLAGS

If you install ALUT from the CVS repository, you'll have to call

./autogen.sh

first, this will generate some necessary files for building ALUT.

If these initial preparations are done, you can simply run:

./configure
make
make install

The last step is optional and must be done as 'root', you can build and use the test programs in 'test_suite' and the example programs in 'examples' without installing ALUT. To build these, just go to the respective subdirectories and run 'make'.

Alternatively, there is a spec file in the admin/RPM subdirectory, which can be used to build an RPM.

Building with Visual Studio projects (deprecated)

(For modern use of Visual Studio, see the CMake instructions)

The admin subdirectory contains VisualStudio6 and VisualStudioDotNET subdirectories, which contain a Visual Studio 6 workspace and a Visual Studio .NET solution, respectively. These expect the OpenAL SDK (header and import library) at the standard path "C:\Program Files\OpenAL 1.1 with EFX SDK". If this is not the case for your setup, you can change this either directly with a text editor in the project files (the only way for real men ;-) or via the project settings within Visual Studio. When everything is OK, just build e.g. the hello_world project and you should get the ALUT library itself and a demo with Steve Baker saying an immortal phrase.

Support

Please don't email me the authors directly, sign up to the OpenAL user's mailing list. Instructions can be found here: http://www.openal.org/

Licensing

These libraries are offered as OpenSource freeware under the provisions of the GNU Library Public License (LGPL). Those terms and conditions are detailed in the file 'COPYING' in this directory.

Portability and Dependencies

This library is designed to be easily portable (and more importantly so that programs using it can be UTTERLY portable).

Compiling/Linking with ALUT

In your source code, simply add:

#include <AL/alut.h>

On *nix-alikes, use

openal-config --cflags
openal-config --libs

to find out the compiler and linker flags needed for OpenAL, the flags needed for ALUT itself depend on the --prefix option given to configure.

In a VisualStudio project, add the path to the ALUT header, import library and DLL to your project settings as usual.

Directories

Within this distribution, you will find the following directories:

admin      -- Administrative files needed for building ALUT
doc        -- The ALUT documentation
examples   -- For application authors, here is a small collection of example
              programs that you can use to get you started
include    -- The ALUT header
src        -- The source code for the ALUT library itself
test_suite -- A small suite of test programs to check that ALUT is installed and
              working correctly