Aligning the public API with that of the latest bevy_audio.

[Olle-Lukowski]

I have been discussing Bevy's audio with a few people in the Bevy discord, we came to the conclusion that upstreaming bevy_kira_audio would be a great idea.

For this to happen, we will need to bring the public API's of both bevy_audio and bevy_kira_audio closer together.
I would really like to help out where I can with this, but I am a bit new to contributing and open source in general. So any guidance would be appreciated.

I will also open an issue in the bevy repo shortly, to discuss the upstreaming itself.

[NiklasEi]

Hey, thank you for pushing this forward! I've been thinking about a more ECS-centric API in bevy_kira_audio in the past weeks and was planning to implement first changes soon. For the beginning, I'd like to play around without following bevy_audio too much. Maybe we'll find some improvements over bevy_audios API along the way.

I would be very happy for help. The first draft, I currently have in mind, probably makes more sense for me to just get done. After that, it would be awesome to get comments and improvements. You can ping me on Discord (@Nikl) or just open issues here to discuss. If you play around with changes in the API and feel like you found something nice don't hesitate to open a PR. Even if it's WIP, you can open a draft PR for early discussion.

I'm very excited for potentially upstreaming bevy_kira_audio. I feel like I haven't done Kira justice in regard to possibilities with Bevy integration. That would definitely change once more people get into development 🙂

[SolarLiner]

What's the status on this @NiklasEi ? I have made my own experiment integration crate in the meantime, and while I didn't have in mind the goal of making it as aligned to current bevy_audio as possible, I'm more and more convinced that trying to fit Kira into the current API is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

[NiklasEi]

I have not worked on it in quite a while and would love some help. In January I started work on this (see the ecs_centric_api branch), but quickly got lost in the weeds. My plan wasn't to try to fit Kira into exactly how Bevy does the Audio API, but fist move the API of bevy_kira_audio to "something ECS centric".
If @Olle-Lukowski is still interested in this (to anyone else), I would have a different opinion now about doing the first rewrite on my own, seeing that I can't give it the time it deserves.

[SolarLiner]

I'm also interested in this going forward, so I could spend some time on it (in fact, I already did as per my link above); I'd need to make some improvements like trying to separate the code better into modules and plugins, as well as trying to make the audio source asset generic like it is currently in bevy_audio. But I'm interested in working on this.