Designing an Audio System

So, we know that audio is important in our games. The real question is this: How do we write an audio system for a game? I’ll bet you were expecting me to bring up DirectSound at about this time. Am I right? On the contrary, DirectSound is a terrible library that cannot even load a WAV file on its own, let alone any other audio format. DirectSound is a very low-level (almost device driver–level) interface to the sound hardware with a mixer. We are not going to waste our time with it. Instead, we’re going to use a professional audio system called FMOD.