games

For anyone actually doing practical audio programming for a game, this book is a great resource. No, it doesn't dig into academic minutia such as implementing your own software mixer, or explaining FFTs or writing custom DSPs, as those topics fall outside the realm of game programming (yes, audio compression uses these items, but no one writes their own audio compression codecs anymore, especially with good open-source alternatives available). Modern audio programming is all about taking advantage of hardware acceleration, and that means using APIs such as DirectX that can do this. The book is quite specialized, but digs into the APIs and gives a lot of good advice on practical implementation that you won't find anywhere else.

It also contains a good deal of the meat and potatoes of game audio programming, such as developing and interactive music system, or creating compelling dynamic soundscapes. The APIs are a big part of that, but not the only part, as a good portion of the book is devoted to these higher-level programming concepts.

I'd highly recommend this book to any game developer who needs to implement (or improve) an audio engine for their Windows PC game. It will give you a big head start, with lots of working source code to play with.

I agree with a previous reviewer that this book is dedicated to developing a high to mid level audio engine based on DirectSound and DirectMusic. This book is not about audio programming from scratch. It doesn't give any algorithms for implementing your own 3D audio engine. It does give pretty good explanation of the I3DL2 spec (but this can be gleaned from the AISIG site. It also has a good explanation of Occlusion and Obstruction.

This book was very disappointing. It is a book about programming audio APIs, not programming audio algorithms. The section on Advanced 3D Techniques is mostly a description of how to use EAX. There is little here that could not be gleaned from the documentation and examples that come with the APIs in question.

This has only the barest whisper of theory. Just enough for someone to understand what a certain function in the provided APIs might mean. DSP, FFT and DCT are not even mentioned in the index! In all, this book is pretty much useful only to someone who doesn't want to deal with the included SDK documentation with DirectX Audio. Anyone working upon a different platform, or wishing to go beyond the basics of merely playing back samples should look elsewhere. Do you really need a 640 page long book just to figure out how to play back a sample?