Miles Sound System SDK 7.2a

Introduction

Discussion

Welcome to the Miles Sound System!

The Miles Sound System has been the standard in video game audio for more than fifteen years now. Fifteen years! It always surprises me to remember that Miles started out before Windows 3.0, before the Mac went to PowerPC, way before even the original Pentium chip - before even the original 16-bit Super NES!

And Miles remains as vital and powerful today as it was back in 1991. Our new Miles 7 is the result of a huge engineering effort - John and I worked long hours to bring you the best features for today's modern PCs and tomorrow's powerful consoles.

We now support a huge number of platforms with several more around the corner. Since we make a point of not doing simple ports, this is a lot of work, but I think you'll like the results. Just as an example, our final version of the Miles mixer for the Xbox 360 ended up 400% faster than the initial Mac-based version that we started with.

And this is what makes our products still so much fun to work on - we get to spend time on them, making them better and better with each passing year. At year fifteen, we think Miles looks better than ever.

This new version continues our progression to primarily software based audio. We still support the EAX variants on Windows, but the cool stuff is definitely happening on the software side of the pool. With Miles 7, you can do full multichannel mixing with full 3D and environmental effects including chainable DSP effects, all of which will sound exactly the same on a 5.1 PC, as a 5.1 Xbox, as a 5.1 CircleSurround encoded stream on a Mac.

The cool thing is that we were able to add all of these new features, but at the same time actually simplify the Miles API dramatically. Miles is still a pretty large SDK, but it's a lot cleaner in version 7!

This documentation will help you get a handle on all of the Miles audio APIs. We spend quite a bit of time working on our docs and hope they get you up and running fast. Please give us feedback on what worked for you and what didn't. Just as with the Miles API itself, we strive for continual improvement in our documentation as well. Your feedback is crucial in this regard!

We realize that documentation is a pain to read when you just want to get up and running quickly, so we've retooled our docs to be more focused on specific tasks and problems. Really, the only documentation that you should force yourself to read is the Overview for your game's platform, and the "FAQs and How Tos" Section.

The "FAQs and How Tos" section is the best way to learn about using Miles - there are lots of "getting started" FAQs as well as tons of hard won trouble-shooting FAQs as well.

I love these new FAQs actually - I think it's a much more effective way to learn the ins and outs of a product than poring over a reference manual - I hope you like them too!

Again, please send feedback to me as you use Miles - what confused you, what you liked, what you hated, what you'd like to see in future versions, etc. Your feedback is what keeps Miles vital, fun to use, and powerful after all these years!

Thanks for all your support,

Jeff Roberts - RAD Game Tools - E-mail.

Introduction
FAQs and How Tos