OpenSL ES - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

OpenSL ES is a royalty-free,
cross-platform, hardware-accelerated,
C-language

C (programming language)

C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

audio API

Application programming interface

An application programming interface is a source code based specification intended to be used as an interface by software components to communicate with each other...

for 2D and 3D audio.

It provides access to features such as 3D positional audio and MIDI playback.
It is made for developers in the mobile and gaming industry and is working toward allowing for easy porting
of applications across multiple platforms.

The OpenSL ES API has five major features:

Basic audio playback and recording
3D audio effects including 3D positional audio
Music experience enhancing effects including bass boost and environmental reverb
Interactive music and ringtones using SP-MIDI, Mobile DLS, Mobile XMF
Buffer Queues

The features of Audio Playback and Recording and Basic MIDI are common with OpenMAX AL.

Design

OpenSL ES utilizes an object oriented design to give application developers access to the audio functionality.
The object model is shared with OpenMAX AL, and a device manufacturer can choose to implement one or both of the APIs.
Together the two APIs give access to a wide range of functionality of the device's multimedia engine.

The design goal of OpenSL ES is to give application developers access to advanced audio features such as 3D positional audio
and MIDI playback while striving for easy application porting between manufacturers and platforms.
It is developed primarily for application developers in the mobile and gaming industry.

Profiles

To avoid fragmentation, OpenSL ES is divided up into three profiles:

Phone
Music
Game

Each profile is designed for the respective device needs with a specific set of audio functionalities.
A vendor can choose to be conformant with only one or with any combination of profiles.

An application can query the OpenSL ES implementation to find out which profiles are supported.
The application developer can then design their application to either work with only the common parts of the profiles,
or adapt to the available functionality as given by the profiles in the device it is running on.
An application developer can also specify both the minimum and the optimal profile requirements.

Development

OpenSL ES is managed by the non-profit

Non-profit organization

Nonprofit organization is neither a legal nor technical definition but generally refers to an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals, rather than distributing them as profit or dividends...

technology consortium

Consortium

A consortium is an association of two or more individuals, companies, organizations or governments with the objective of participating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal....

Khronos Group

The Khronos Group is a not-for-profit member-funded industry consortium based in Beaverton, Oregon, focused on the creation of open standard, royalty-free APIs to enable the authoring and accelerated playback of dynamic media on a wide variety of platforms and devices...

. The current chair of the OpenSL ES working group is Erik Noreke.

Specification versions

OpenSL ES 1.0 Specification was released March 24, 2009.
Minor release 1.0.1 followed September 24, 2009.
OpenSL ES 1.1 Specification was released January 18, 2011.

Implementations

Android 2.3 exposes OpenSL ES 1.0 as part of their NDK.
A full implementation of OpenSL ES 1.1 is available from SRS Labs
SRS Labs
SRS Labs, Inc. , is a Santa Ana, California-based audio technology engineering company that specializes in audio enhancement solutions for wide variety of consumer electronic devices. Originally a part of Hughes Aircraft Company, the audio division developed the Sound Retrieval System technology,...

.

External links