OpenSL ES
Encyclopedia
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
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


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,...

    .

See also

  • OpenMAX AL - Application level multimedia API
  • OpenAL
    OpenAL
    OpenAL is a cross-platform audio API. It is designed for efficient rendering of multichannel three dimensional positional audio. Its API style and conventions deliberately resemble those of OpenGL.- History :...

     - advanced audio API for desktop and iOS
  • Advanced Multimedia Supplements
    Advanced Multimedia Supplements
    In computing, the Advanced Multimedia Supplements is an API specification for the Java ME platform. Practically speaking, it is an extension to JSR 135 Mobile Media API providing new features, such as positional 3D audio processing, audio and video effects processing, better controls for digital...

    (JSR 234) - Java API for mobile devices

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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