Summary: This interview with Nathan Charles from Creative and Ytai Ben-Tsvi from Samsung looks at the new OpenSL ES (Open Sound Library for Embedded Systems) API to reduce fragmentation in the audio market and standardize access to hardware acceleration and advanced audio functionality. There is a bewildering variety of proprietary audio APIs in the embedded market. Games or music applications have to either write to the lowest common demonitor (which is very low) or lose portability between devices. OpenSL ES provides a cross-platform, common API, with support for current standards built in. Different applications need different kinds of functionality. Profiles address these different markets. Different devices will ship with different numbers of profiles based on their markets Three profiles to start: Game profile (include functionality such as 3D positioning of sound), music profile (for MP3 Players) and phone profile (for phone UI, ring-tone and simple 2D games) OpenSL ES will let silicon vendors stop having to support many drivers for many different APIs, and instead have a common way to provide hardware accelerated audio OpenSL ES is receiving enormous support from most of the major audio API and hardware vendors. The Working Group represents both PC and mobile developers so it brings the perspective of both together. Public launch of the specification is expected in early 2007
