Overview

Immersive Simulation

A virtual world, just like the real world, consists of multiple sound emitters all with their own location, direction, velocity and properties. But most of the time multiple sound emitters are connected together within a frame of some sort. Cars or airplanes for example have an engine, tire noise, sound of closing doors any many more.

AeonWave also allows multiple emitters to be interconnected using audio-frames. All emitters will be positioned relative to an imaginary center-point and will still have their own set of properties (like audio cone or frequency filtering). Audio-frames also add their own set of properties which will affect all registered emitters when set or changed. Emitters may be rendered in multiple threads which will help to spread the load across multiple CPU cores.

Changing the position, orientation, velocity and/or audio-frame properties will affect the position, orientation, velocity and/or properties of all attached emitters.

Game Consoles

Game consoles (including desktop and laptop PC's) benefit from all features described under Immersive Simulation, Studio Effect Mixing and Embedded systems. But most of all game consoles benefit from the fact that AeonWave renders audio 60% to 400% faster than other libraries.

Fast audio rendering means there's more room left for the game designers core business: making gaming fun.

Studio Effect Mixing

By design AeonWave is able to handle stereo (multi-channel) mixing just as well as spatialized 3D audio by supporting multiple input sources, sub-mixing and filters and effects like compression, AGC, frequency filtering and equalization.

Multiple filters and effects can be applied to sound sources and multiple sound sources can be grouped together using AeonWaves sub-mixing capable audio-frames. Audio-frames also support filters and effects and applying them will affect all sound sources attached to the audio-frame.

Registered sensors support audio capturing from hardware as well as reading various file formats resulting in automatic file streaming playback from a local storage device or from a remote web server. Registered sensors release the application developers from the burden of moving captured buffers to the library using timers or event signals: registered sensors are automatically added to the (final) mix. Registered sensors add channel selection (to be able to move them in the 3D scenery) and have AGC support.

Most filters and effects can also be applied to the final mixer stage but reverb, convolution or a 8-band graphical equalizer are reserved for the final mixer only.

Embedded systems

AeonWave is perfectly suited for embedded systems with little or no external storage space: by combining hardware accelerated rendering (including accelerated filters and effects) and the integrated waveform generator to generate audio buffers on-demand. The waveform generator is powerful enough to be used for synthesizer purposes while the hardware accelerated rendering provides enough room for other tasks to run simultaneously.

Various techniques are used to save on (battery) power requirements; compared to non hardware accelerated renderers AeonWave will save about one Watt on power consumption when playing back 32 emitters simultaneously. The library also supports a standby mode which reduces the power consumption to almost zero while still keeping track of positions, orientations and playback positions.

The library has been compiled on MIPS, ARM®, AMD and Intel® CPU's.

Synthesizers

The advanced waveform generator in combination with the timed-gain filter and effect (for envelope definitions) and dynamic filter and effects (tremolo and vibrato) makes up for a great synthesizer. Add to that the other filters and effects and the library allows for an almost unlimited number of instrument types to be simulated. Ranging from an excellent high quality grand piano, to a brass section or a funky slap bass to real synthesizer specific sounds.

See the MIDI example file section for the some example files played back using AeonWave.

AeonWave already ships with 130 pre-installed instrument definitions, 55 pre-installed drum definitions and 84 pre-installed sound effect definitions for every one to use. Being it for synthesizer applications or for game sound effects.
The aim is to eventually ship with the complete General MIDI instrument set and work towards GS MIDI compliance and extending the number of sound effects to far beyond any MIDI standard specially for use by games.