Algorithm to mix sound

Question

I have two raw sound streams that I need to add together. For the purposes of this question, we can assume they are the same bitrate and bit depth (say 16 bit sample, 44.1k

Answer 1

Most audio mixing applications will do their mixing with floating point numbers (32 bit is plenty good enough for mixing a small number of streams). Translate the 16 bit samples into floating point numbers with the range -1.0 to 1.0 representing full scale in the 16 bit world. Then sum the samples together - you now have plenty of headroom. Finally, if you end up with any samples whose value goes over full scale, you can either attenuate the whole signal or use hard limiting (clipping values to 1.0).

This will give much better sounding results than adding 16 bit samples together and letting them overflow. Here's a very simple code example showing how you might sum two 16 bit samples together:

short sample1 = ...;
short sample2 = ...;
float samplef1 = sample1 / 32768.0f;
float samplef2 = sample2 / 32768.0f;
float mixed = samplef1 + sample2f;
// reduce the volume a bit:
mixed *= 0.8;
// hard clipping
if (mixed > 1.0f) mixed = 1.0f;
if (mixed < -1.0f) mixed = -1.0f;
short outputSample = (short)(mixed * 32768.0f)