3D and Surround Sound

3D and surround sound in XAudio2 is perhaps the biggest departure from DirectSound’s model. In DirectSound, DirectSound3D buffers and the DirectSound3DListener were used to take a sound emitter’s x, y, z position in 3D space and cause the sound to seem to come from the appropriate location. In XAudio2, there is no inherent notion of 3D—there is nothing analogous to a DirectSound3D buffer.

Instead, an application specifies individual volume levels for each speaker, typically 5.1 or 7.1. A game can put a sound only in a specific speaker (for example, the center channel for dialogue), or it can calculate the appropriate volume level for each speaker given the x, y, z positions of sound source and camera.

To make this easy, a complementary API, X3DAudio, is used. X3DAudio converts simple game geometry data into signal processing parameters suitable for passing to XAudio2. It takes x, y, z coordinates for sound sources and listeners, and outputs a vector of speaker volumes for each output speaker.

X3DAudio has only two functions, X3DAudioInitialize and X3DAudioCalculate. X3DAudio allows for multiple sound sources, multiple listeners, cones, and a flexible mapping model. X3DAudio also returns the results of some of its own internal calculations, such as source-to-listener distance, internal data from Doppler calculations and other information valuable to the game engine itself.

By separating the signal processing library, XAudio2, from the geometry library, X3DAudio, 3D audio becomes much more flexible and transparent. The following figure shows how X3DAudio and XAudio2 are used together by the game engine to create 3D/Surround sound.

The Audio Stack: Top to Bottom

On Xbox 360, XAudio2 sits on top of the XMA hardware decoder and the audio output system of Xbox 360. On Windows Vista, XAudio2 streams directly into the lowest audio API, WASAPI, while on Windows XP, it streams its output to a single DirectSound buffer. For games that use XACT3, XAudio2 is the audio signal processing engine that runs underneath the high-level XACT 3 library.

XAudio2 in Other APIs

As a low-level audio engine, XAudio2 is under the hood in several other APIs. XAudio2 is the low-level engine driving XACT3. For Windows developers, this is transparent. Xbox 360 developers will notice a change in the way that audio DSP effects are used, which requires some code changes to reflect the new xAPO model.

On Xbox 360, the XHV and XMV APIs now have XAudio2 counterparts: XHV2 and XMV2. These are versions of the Xbox 360 voice and full-motion video player libraries that use XAudio2 under the hood.

When Will XAudio2 Be Available?

XAudio2 is available today as part of the November Xbox 360 XDK and DirectX SDK. If you haven’t taken a look, now’s a great time to do so. The first approved version for Xbox 360 and release version for Windows will be available in the March 2008 XDK/SDK, with updates and enhancements following in June.

The audio team at XNA is tremendously excited about XAudio2 for both Xbox 360 and Windows. It completes a major piece of our cross-platform initiative for audio technologies that we’ve had in the making for some time, and it provides a strong foundation for game audio well into the future.