Programming sound for simulation program

[Christopher Lee <chlee MIT EDU>]

Hi Gnome-app-hackers,

I'm writing a robot simulation program with GNOME that does 3D animation
using OpenGL, and one of the outputs of the program is MPEG videos of
the simulations.  I make these by exporting frames to an encoder from
mjpegtools.  I'd like to be able to add sound to both the interface
while watching the simulation run, and to the resulting MPEG movies when
the movies are exported.  The simulation in the interface will normally
run slower than the timescale in the MPEG.

I know nothing of sound programming and the gnome-sound documentation at
developer.gnome.org is minimal, so I'd like recommendations for toolkits
or libraries I may be able to use.  What I'd like is to be able to loop
different .wav sounds to indicate things like motor torques, play a .wav
a single time when a wheel contacts the ground or gripper contacts a
part, and eventually be able to generate a .wav which syncs these sounds
to their timing in the generated video.  It would be really nice if I
could be playing music from a mod-file in the background too (in both
the interface and the video)?  I also cannot spend a ton of time on this
(need to do real research too), so if I had to write a lot of the code
myself I'd better skip sound completely.

Thanks for any recommendations,
 -Chris

-- 
Christopher Lee <chlee mit edu>
(617) 253-5095 <http://web.mit.edu/chlee/www>
Postdoctoral Associate of Mechanical Engineering
Field and Space Robotics Laboratory
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Ave, Room 3-472m
Cambridge, MA 02139