Endless audio stream support

[frabert]

This is a followup from https://discourse.bsframework.io/t/endless-audio-stream-support/434

I'm willing to work on adding this feature to the codebase. I am thinking that the best way would not be to modify AudioClip to support "infinite" lenghts, but to introduce a new class (AudioStream maybe?) that only supports PCM audio from a stream.What do you think?

[BearishSun]

It would be really nice to have support for this.

I would only consider doing it in a separate class if the solution requires a radically different approach than what AudioClip already does. I took a quick look at it when I answered that post on discourse, and it seemed like only minor modifications regarding checks for fixed length might be required. AudioClip already supports different load modes, so adding one more wouldn't be a stretch, even if the modifications aren't as simple.

Compare that to adding a separate class, things get a lot more complex as they need to be usable in the same places (meaning same base, which breaks the API, or deriving from AudioClip itself, which will probably be a lot of refactoring). Also the plugin implementations don't like implementing class hierarchies, requiring intermediate classes which make things even more complex, esp. if a simple if could have done the job.

[frabert]

Interesting, because the idea of creating a separate class was precisely to not introduce breaking changes for previous users 😄 I will take a look at it and report back when I know something more about it