Noticing the absence of good tutorials on sound and OpenAL in the wiki – definitely something I'd like to help remedy! But first, I have to ask some naive questions:
There are some really nice OpenAL tutorials on the lwjgl site:
http://lwjgl.org/documentation_openal_01.php
Now, as I understand it, the lwjgl implementation is the one in jME. But is there any difference in implementation? The jME classes are all in the jmex package, not org.lwjgl.openal.* – that is, am I likely to get a "fresher" version if I hit the lwjgl repository independently and build openal from that?
(I'll give some of those lwjgl-modified tutorials a go in jME and see how it goes, of course…)
Also, is there any advantage to playing with the JOAL implementation, which is theoretically the reference implementation, in place of lwjgl?
https://joal.dev.java.net/
The bad news on JOAL is that it's listed as dormant. The good news is, I see fresh nightlies for 8/17, just since I was there yesterday. Also, I can't tell if it's JOAL that's been archived, or the demos for JOAL. (the latter is what it looks like, even though that'd be rather silly … )
Ben Fry of the Processing project had mentioned at one point considering OpenAL as an audio engine, via JOAL, not lwjgl (Processing uses JOGL instead of lwjgl as its render pipeline, so that makes some sense). Processing could be a nice environment for doing some prototyping for sound design in jME without contending with your whole jME project.
But anyone with advice about using jmex.* vs. lwjgl.* vs. JOAL, happy to hear it … I'll be messing around, in the meantime.