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i'm not really up to date anymore what the cool kids use nowadays for sound/music playback, so i thought i'll ask the hopefully-still-uptodate-guys (and btw: i'm also not motivated to write it myself, as i wanna concentrate on other stuff).

what i want it to do:
- be able to play (long/music) mp3s (with just some simple standard stuff i can tweak like volume, panning, pitch, etc)
- be able to play sound effects (again with some simple standard stuff to tweak)
- obviously a lot of these simultaneously (i.e. mixing (at least) one musictrack and multiple soundfx)
- be able to specify different sound outputs/cards for each sound/mp3 (the music and some of the fx for example should be able to play through one set of speakers, the remaining stuff through a second set)
- 32bit & 64bit windoze
- if possible (no requirement though) no dlls, just libs (or plain source, but i guess thats overkill)

Some "cool kids" use SFML and such, but I don't think BASS/FMOD have been surpassed for most of the things you listed.

Yeah, BASS should be able to do all of that (possibly in combination with some of its addons like BASSMIX).

BASS is 32bit only (AFAIK), and "classic" FMOD seems to be discontinued in favor of their new API.
(i would want it also to be a still active project if somehow possible)

So SFML is capable of all that?

oh, bass seems to be 64bit also by now, sorry..

Your knowledge is wrong.

I'm not sure if you can do the different speakers thing in SFML, but it is also available for 64 bit. If you're already familiar with BASS, I'd probably go with that.

okay, thanks.. (though i still can use more opinions)

It probably doesn't have everything you need (especially the multi-soundcard support, but I didn't have a very deep look so I wouldn't know exactly), but maybe SoL's SoLoud would suit your needs, especially since it's OSS.

from a quick browse of the "documentation" i think SFML is also out due to missing multi-soundcard support..

What do you want to achieve with multi sound card support? Keep in mind that the sample clocks will not be synchronized between two sound cards, which leads to slight differences in playback speed and will completely screw up any attempt at doing sample accurate surround sound properly.

Of course, feel free to "yeah, whatever" this.

Its not so sophisticated actually, its really just only about one sound effect coming from one set of speakers, a completely different one from another one, it doesn't need to be perfectly synchronized.

You don't need two soundcards for that, a surround set or a home recording card with more than one stereo output will be enough for that, with the advantage of proper synchronization.

i know, but this is not just for my own personal use.. ;)

Well, what is the intended target audience then? Do they have easy access to systems with surround output (I guess every PC these days has at least 5.1 onboard) or multi-I/O soundcards?

If you truly need that and other, more esoteric features, and BASS won't do, it might be quicker to roll your own (using DirectSound3D/OpenAL etc.) after all.

I'm currently developing an open source sound player lib using OpenAL + under the hood, maybe that fits your needs? (warning - WIP)
Doesn't support multiple cards, but you could try using 3D audio and play some things in front and other things in the back of the listener, should work with a proper speaker setup regardless of which lib you use.
Other than that, i don't know of any other audio lib that supports multiple cards. Maybe FMOD offers this, if you can live with its licensing policy.

So far i found BASS will do the job well. Didn't stumble over anything that shouldn't work later-on.

Thanks guys!