How can the above mentioned problems be addressed during the process of spatial sound authoring? One impractical solution would be to have all platforms available and to do tests, but even so not all configurations could be covered.
We propose to monitor resource requests during the authoring process. This will help to inform the author and sound developer about active sources and resource allocation. We have developed a sound spatialization resource manager [Herder-Cohen97], including a monitor for the requests and allocations. The panel shown in Figure 5 gives access to the number of sound sources and sinks, the number of active (i.e., requested) sources, the number of ambient sources, and the number of virtual sources in a scene. Virtual sources represent a cluster of sound sources which can be spatialized as a single source, mixing the audio signals before the spatialization is performed. Ambient sources do not use spatialization resources, but produce a load for the sound generation mechanism.
Figure 5: Sound spatialization resource manager panel
