Is it possible to use the iPhone’s hardware accelerated decoding of mp3s and AAC when using the OpenAL library?
I suppose there are two possible approaches if this is possible.
iPhone specific OpenAL extensions.
iPhone APIs to decode audio into raw bytes.
I have two specific use cases.
- Completely decode a short sound bite.
- Piecewise decode a larger sound file so it can be streamed into OpenAL rather than loaded all at once.
update
Boy! no one’s got an answer for this? Does Apple’s NDA stiffle these kinds of questions? What’s going on? Surely someone else using OpenAL has wanted better audio performance.
There is at least one hardware (or hardware assisted) decoder in all iPhone device models. It can be accessed to convert mp3 and AAC files into raw PCM bytes by using the Audio Queue Services API. From thence you can process those bytes or send them to OpenAL.