It's officially the "month of updates"! This new release (available on the
Open Source page) features a big overhaul of the FMOD Ex start-up sequence and core functionality. The start-up sequence now conforms to
these specifications as recommended by the FMOD dudes, and the classes now give you (nearly) full control over every FMOD Ex init parameter. You can also enumerate drivers, pick outputs, choose speaker modes, and so on. Don't worry though, you don't
have screw around with all that if you don't want/need to - one simple call will still choose the best/default settings automagically.
Part of the core overhaul means the classes now support multichannel and surround sound hardware. If you've got a 5.1 or 7.1 speaker setup the 3D engine will automatically take advantage that hardware (sadly, FMOD Ex only supports real surround sound on Windows, best you can do on Mac/Linux is Prologic). You can also configure stuff like ASIO output and "raw" speaker modes to manually map audio through pro-level hardware.
There are some other goodies in there, like being able to read (and in some cases modify) raw PCM data, plus a bunch of bug fixes and
shiny new documentation. Also, don't let the perpetual "beta" status scare ya off - these classes have been used in shipping products for years now. "Beta" just means they aren't done yet. I have recording and waveform plotting classes near completion, and some big 3D audio updates planned as well.
