I’ve quickly dipped into the “Blender 3.0 Manual” for a description of the “Sound” settings here in the “Preferences”:
Sound
This panel contains the sound settings for live playback within Blender and are only available with SDL or OpenAL. To control these settings for exporting sound see the Encoding Panel and Audio Panel.
- Audio Device
-
Sets the audio engine to use to process and output audio.
- None
-
No Audio support (audio strips can still be loaded normally).
- SDL
-
Uses Simple Direct Media Layer API from libsdl.org to render sounds directly to the sound device output. Very useful for Sequencer strips editing.
- OpenAL
-
Provides buffered sound rendering with 3D/spatial support. Used for 3D source support by speaker objects.
- Channels
-
Sets the audio channel count.
- Mixing Buffer
-
Sets the number of samples used by the audio mixing buffer. Higher buffer sizes can cause latency issues, but if you hear clicks or other problems, try to increase the size.
- Sample Rate
-
Sets the audio sampling rate.
- Sample Format
-
Sets the audio sample format.
It’s interesting that it only mentions sound buffering for “OpenAL”. The “speaker objects” also mentioned for “OpenAL” seem to be what is demonstrated in this Blender Tutorial by “Darkfall”.
I suppose that “WASAPI” is “Windows” specific since it’s not listed or described at all in the manual.
