What does Audiere mean? -- Nothing, really. Theo Reed suggested it. Pronounced "ah dee air". I got Audiere to compile and install properly, but when I try to link with it, I get an error telling me that "libaudiere cannot be found" What do I do? -- Locate the libaudiere libraries on your system. By default, they're in /usr/local/lib. Make sure that directory is listed in /etc/ld.so.conf or add the path to the environmental variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH. If you changed /etc/ld.so.conf, run ldconfig as root. It should work now. Why did you make this? We already have FMOD. -- I'm not a fan of FMOD's API, and it's not open source. It's a lot of fun, too. :) Why not support MIDI? -- I'd like to keep every supported decoder inside of Acoustique (i.e. not using an external program). The only good software MIDI decoder I've found is timidity++, and that requires megs upon megs of patch files. I think having a 20 meg sound library isn't really feasible. Why doesn't Audiere 1.0.4 or 1.9.0 support MP3 when Audiere 1.0.3 did? -- Up to version 1.0.3, Audiere used the MAD MP3 decoder to play MP3 files. The problem with MAD is that it is licensed under the GPL, thus requiring Audiere to be licensed under the GPL, thus requiring any program that uses Audiere to be released under the GPL. This is unacceptable for a lot of people that want to use Audiere, especially for games. At first, I dual-licensed the source. If you built it with MP3 support, it was under the GPL. Otherwise, it was under the LGPL. However, this was a pain to document and maintain. MAD is also a very low-level API, and adding support for seeking within MP3 streams would be a lot of work. I decided the best path right now would be to remove MP3 support until either MAD is released under the LGPL or somebody adds support for another MP3 decoder under a less restrictive license. Besides, Audiere supports Ogg Vorbis, which is equivalent to MP3 for most purposes anyway. As of August, 2002, Jacky Chong is trying to add support for MP3 again using mpglib. As of the 1.9.2 release, Audiere supports MP3 thanks to the splay library. However, there is very little LGPL-compatible MP3 code out there that works across a wide range of MP3s and hardware. I highly recommend using Ogg Vorbis for all of your music needs. It uses less CPU time by about a factor of five *and* sounds better. How do I load a sound into memory so that it isn't streamed? -- The OpenSound function has two modes of operation. If the third argument 'streaming' is true, it just streams audio from the source. If 'streaming' is passed as false, it tries to load the sound into memory. You probably want streaming to be true for background music, but false for sound effects.