Miles Sound System 9

The Miles Sound System is the longest-running commercially available sound middleware for games. Miles was developed by John Miles in the early 1990s, and acquired by RAD Game Tools in 1995. Version 9 brings a new feature called Timeline, which brings Miles into the modern era.

Miless compression includes support for Bink audio encoding (of course), a clean-room Ogg implementation, and MP3 rights. Channel control and surround support, and the means to create as much high-level functionality as you want (such as custom effects, the ability to control channel count for things like rapid-fire weapons, metrics reporting, and profile for memory) are also included. When compared with its competitors, Miles holds its ownits fast, cross-platform, and easy to integrate into your games codebase, but it was mostly limited to managing your sound bank rather than giving you direct control in the game runtime.

I did some high-level functionality creation alongside some Obsidian programmers around 2007, using Miles and a proprietary engine. But over the years, Miles has started to show its age. For some time, Miles was little more than a robust and reliable low-level system, providing the core functionality most game engineering teams needed to play back just about any audio they wanted. It was (and still is) built like a tank, with hardly any crashes or bugs, and most senior engineers know it wont give them any surprises. Since then, though, higher-level graphical user interfaces, real-time controls, and advanced bank management across all platforms were being exploited by Miless main competitorsAudioKinetics Wwise and Firelight Studioss FMOD. Wwise and FMOD became the Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox to Miless Sega Dreamcast. I believe thats about to change.

At this years GDC, RAD showcased the newest version of Miles, including Miles Sound Studio 9. Its...