Ask Slashdot: Is There a Good Sound Library for Linux?

Adam Wiggins writes in to ask this question: "Someone please tell me there's a descent sound library for Linux? Price is no object - we can afford to drop a couple thousand bucks on a license, although obviously a GPL'd one would be cooler." Good question! Click the link for more!

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Here's more background on Adam's question:

"At work I've managed to convince my project leader to let us do a Linux version of our (commercial) game. I got every system-specific aspect of it converted over to Linux (joystick, graphics, keyboard, mouse, widgets) ... except sound. It currently uses the Miles Sound System, which supports only Win32 and DOS - it's pretty nice, although I thought ~$7000 for a license was a bit steep. Anyhow, I need to support all the same functionality in Linux: playing mod/s3m-style files, multichannel sample mixing, panning, volume control, etc. All the basic stuff. I figured, hey - no big deal, surely such a library exists for Linux. Well, after scouring the web for most of a day, I've found very little that's promising. The best ones have been Midas and Seal, both of which explicitly prohibit commercial use. A promising one was SL (even a C++ interface), except that it seems to have some terrible limitations (3 sounds at once?!). The most likely candidate I came up with was something called soundIt, an ancient sound library written in 400 lines of C code which does multichannel sounds, but no special file formats, no volume/pan control, and no music of any sort."

Something like this would be very cool, and would be another selling point to convince game developers that Linux might be a platform to consider supporting. Remember: Standard sound support was one of the things that wooed developers to Win32!