Sound System Options

To play audio in your game, Panda3D can offer you the following three choices of audio libraries:

• OpenAL is a well-known and popular open-source audio library. Although it runs on Windows without problems, Panda3D's support for OpenAL is not yet fully stable on Linux. If you are experiencing problems, you might want to consider using a different library like PyOpenAL.




• FMOD is a powerful proprietary cross-platform sound engine that supports various types of sound files - MP3, WAV, AIFF, MIDI, MOD, WMA, and OGG Vorbis. However, its license restricts you from using it for commercial purposes unless you actually purchase a special license. Non-commercial use of FMOD is free of charge. (For more information on this, visit the FMOD Licenses page.)




• Miles is a sound system that is not included in the downloadable binaries of Panda3D. In order to use this you will need to purchase Miles and compile Panda3D from scratch using the ppremake system.

If these choices are not enough for you, then you can try other sound libraries.

Setting the Sound System

To configure Panda3D to use a specific sound system, you will need to change your Config.prc configuration. You should look up the variable audio-library-name and change the value to one of p3openal_audio, p3fmod_audio, or miles_audio. (The names of the libraries may differ with the way Panda3D was built.)

Extra Notes

If you don't want to use one or both of the libraries shipped by default with the SDK, then you can remove the associated library files after installation or compile Panda3D from source with the appropriate settings to keep them out of the build.

Note for users of Panda3D 1.5.4 and under: If you are using FMOD and a 64-bit operating system, you might run into a strange assertion error or even a crash if the memory address of the sound exceeds 4 billion. This is because of an issue in FMOD. To avoid being affected by this issue, you must make sure your memory usage doesn't exceed 4 GiB (which is not likely, and even impossible on 32-bit systems).