LÖVE

yes, you're right, it's best to release a statically version of löve, sometimes too many dependancies can be a pain.

There's always OpenAL

Isn't OpenAL a little complicated for the use of 2D games? And can it read files or does that have to be done by us?

mike wrote:Isn't OpenAL a little complicated for the use of 2D games?

OpenGL for 2D games?

Hello, I am a troll, please feed me I am hungry. You cannot pass this bridge before paying the bridge toll.

OpenGL is fast, open, easy (relatively, wait, fuck do I know...) and has functions to base shit off 2D only (Vertex2f for instance). What would you rather have us do? Use SDL only? The speed would die and so would I*

EDIT: What I meant was that, by what I read, OpenAL was fucking epic when it comes to placing sounds in a 3D space and seemed a little over-powered for just having sounds... but, what do I know? As far as I am concerned, rude has the final word when it comes to selecting libraries as I don't have the patience to read up on what it requires/provides and the alternatives.

* Beware the master rhymes comin out of this box, yo!

Hehehe. Yeah, OpenAL may be a bit much for what we're wanting, here. Or it may be the most epic thing ever. "I can totally hear the Shy Guys in the background when Mario jumps! And they sound like they're way back there! Woah!"

Okay, looking it over a bit more OpenAL is probably a bit of over-kill.

I've never used OpenAL directly, but it works pretty sweet in LWJGL (LightWeight Java Game Library),
you can do anything from simple panning, to 3D placement, and what-not, but not sure how hard it is to implement in OpenAL itself.
Also, OpenAL does not provide sound parsing as far as I know.
If you however want a free sound library, but it's only free for non-commercial use, there's always FMOD, which is "making love" sweet (or making sweet love if you please), I think only version 3 is free, but it supports all kinds of crazy p00p, just about any kind of mod format, mp3s, oggs, wav, aiff, au, any retarded format you can name mostly.
But, again, it costs money for commercial projects, which means if anyone suddenly decides to make a commercial love game, they've got to pay an fmod license, which is pretty expensive as it's a professional library for consoles as well as computers and widely used apparently.

fmod is not open source, so you can't even use it on platform which are not supported (linux ppc, linux cell and such). If Löve depends on this, it won't be included into mainstream linux distributions...

I don't löve fmod at all!

I'm guessing the current SDL-based sound mixers are probably adequate for what we're doing here.