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Rating: 
Summary: A great resource
Review: For anyone actually doing practical audio programming for a game, this book is a great resource. No, it doesn't dig into academic minutia such as implementing your own software mixer, or explaining FFTs or writing custom DSPs, as those topics fall outside the realm of game programming (yes, audio compression uses these items, but no one writes their own audio compression codecs anymore, especially with good open-source alternatives available). Modern audio programming is all about taking advantage of hardware acceleration, and that means using APIs such as DirectX that can do this. The book is quite specialized, but digs into the APIs and gives a lot of good advice on practical implementation that you won't find anywhere else.It also contains a good deal of the meat and potatoes of game audio programming, such as developing and interactive music system, or creating compelling dynamic soundscapes. The APIs are a big part of that, but not the only part, as a good portion of the book is devoted to these higher-level programming concepts. I'd highly recommend this book to any game developer who needs to implement (or improve) an audio engine for their Windows PC game. It will give you a big head start, with lots of working source code to play with.
Rating:
Summary: A great resource
Review: I agree with a previous reviewer that this book is dedicated to developing a high to mid level audio engine based on DirectSound and DirectMusic. This book is not about audio programming from scratch. It doesn't give any algorithms for implementing your own 3D audio engine. It does give pretty good explanation of the I3DL2 spec (but this can be gleaned from the AISIG site. It also has a good explanation of Occlusion and Obstruction.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for learning about API, not audio prgramming
Review: I agree with a previous reviewer that this book is dedicated to developing a high to mid level audio engine based on DirectSound and DirectMusic. This book is not about audio programming from scratch. It doesn't give any algorithms for implementing your own 3D audio engine. It does give pretty good explanation of the I3DL2 spec (but this can be gleaned from the AISIG site. It also has a good explanation of Occlusion and Obstruction.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent !!! - Informative, Disciplined, and Practical...
Review: I recently had the opportunity to be the sole programmer for a very cool project that was a combination of a music player and a comprehensive jukebox. Yet, this was my first experience with *serious* audio programming on the Windows platform. While doing my research on how I would meet the requirements for this project (including playback, sound mixing, crossfading, and conversions between the various standard audio formats - WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG Vorbis), I was very fortunate to stumble on this book while in a bookstore in Manhattan. At first I was thrown off by the title and assumed that this book was intended solely for 'game developers.' However, after picking it up and scanning it, I quickly realized that that was not the case. This book is for *anyone* interested in audio programming on the Windows platform. In my opinion, this book accomplishes several things VERY well: 1) Provides the reader with a very good understanding about how audio works in general and the key components of any wave that you must understand when tackling a project such as mine (eg. sampling rate, bit depth, etc.) 2) While geared towards using the DirectX Audio APIs, the author provides a sound explanation (no pun intended) of why this API should be seriously considered and how it compares to using other APIs (typically offered by a 3rd party) 3) Perhaps most important, the author takes a very disciplined approach to the design of an audio system. This is extrememly helpful since many readers, like myself, will purchase this book not only because they have an interest in audio, but also because they need/want to build their own set of audio engines that they can use/reuse in present and future projects. This feature alone seperates this book from most, if not all others (that are typically reference books to a technology such as DirectX). This also demonstrates that the author has a very solid meta-level understanding of what he is writing about, pulling from many recognized and practical real-world projects. 4) Serves as a very good reference to the DirectX Audio APIs (DirectSound and DirectMusic) and even the Windows Media Format SDK 5) Discusses the main file formats (Raw PCM, WAV, WMA, MP3, OGG Vorbis) and how you can employ various codecs to get wave data from a file to a DirectSound buffer or vice versa. This is very useful because, on the Windows platform, you dont get some of these formats for free. So, an understanding of how you can design a system to support virtually any audio codec is therefore invaluable - and something the author does very well. He even walks you through the integration of the MP3 and OGG Vorbis formats into your audio engine. I really cant say enough about this book. In fact, even though I shop here ALL the time, this is the first book review I have ever written on Amazon's website. Anyone who is interested in audio programming, at ANY level, should purchase this book. You will NOT be disappointed.
Rating: 
Summary: A book about API, not audio
Review: This book was very disappointing. It is a book about programming audio APIs, not programming audio algorithms. The section on Advanced 3D Techniques is mostly a description of how to use EAX. There is little here that could not be gleaned from the documentation and examples that come with the APIs in question. This has only the barest whisper of theory. Just enough for someone to understand what a certain function in the provided APIs might mean. DSP, FFT and DCT are not even mentioned in the index! In all, this book is pretty much useful only to someone who doesn't want to deal with the included SDK documentation with DirectX Audio. Anyone working upon a different platform, or wishing to go beyond the basics of merely playing back samples should look elsewhere. Do you really need a 640 page long book just to figure out how to play back a sample?
Rating:
Summary: A book about API, not audio
Review: This book was very disappointing. It is a book about programming audio APIs, not programming audio algorithms. The section on Advanced 3D Techniques is mostly a description of how to use EAX. There is little here that could not be gleaned from the documentation and examples that come with the APIs in question. This has only the barest whisper of theory. Just enough for someone to understand what a certain function in the provided APIs might mean. DSP, FFT and DCT are not even mentioned in the index! In all, this book is pretty much useful only to someone who doesn't want to deal with the included SDK documentation with DirectX Audio. Anyone working upon a different platform, or wishing to go beyond the basics of merely playing back samples should look elsewhere. Do you really need a 640 page long book just to figure out how to play back a sample?
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