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tjcinnamon.
AudioEngine (AE) is now in the nightly builds as it has merged with master, and it is the way forward. The patch provided here by DaniellaE has been a stop-gap measure to provide HD support until AE was stable enough to be merged and put in to general use.
The patch provided here is excellent and supports some formats AE does not, but it does not have any of the analog audio benefits that AE introduces, which are:
* Support for greater then 16bit resolution of all audio codecs and output devices.
* Removal of SDL_Mixer and full GUI sound integration (no more output device contention for GUI sounds)
* Real-time transcoding of audio to AC3 including GUI sounds when required
* PAPlayer supports bitstreaming now
* Upmixing sources to create missing channels (optional)
* Much tighter A/V sync
There will also be coming digital signal processors (DSPs) soon which will allow advanced features usually only seen in top-end studio equipment, such as configurable DRC and real time configurable HRTF (Head-related transfer function) for headphone users. The DSP interface will be pluggable and will allow people to write their own custom DSPs for whatever they want or need.
And finally, AE runs on all platforms, it is not windows specific.