Audio libraries

free software multimedia library

OpenAL (Open Audio Library) is a cross-platform audio application programming interface (API). It is designed for efficient rendering of multichannel three-dimensional positional audio. Its API style and conventions deliberately resemble those of OpenGL. OpenAL is an environmental 3D audio library, which can add realism to a game by simulating attenuation (degradation of sound over distance), the Doppler effect (change in frequency as a result of motion), and material densities.

computer sound card driver protocol

professional sound server daemon

PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.

PipeWire is a low-level server and multimedia framework for handling audio and video streams on Linux. Created by Wim Taymans at Red Hat, it aims to unify audio and video processing by providing low-latency capture and playback functionality. PipeWire facilitates advanced multimedia routing and pipeline processing, and is designed to replace and be compatible with existing sound systems.

Audio interface for Unix-like operating systems

cross-platform software development library designed to provide a simple application programming interface (API) to various multimedia components in computers

The '''Linux Audio Developer's Simple Plugin API (LADSPA''') is an application programming interface (API) standard for handling audio filters and audio signal processing effects, licensed under LGPL-2.1-or-later. Originally designed through consensus on the Linux Audio Developers mailing list, it now works on a variety of platforms. It is used in many free audio software projects, and there is a wide range of LADSPA plug-ins available.

libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.

aRts (which stands for analog real time synthesizer) is an audio framework that is no longer under development. It was best known for previously being used in K Desktop Environment 2 and 3 to simulate an analog synthesizer.

FMOD is a proprietary sound effects engine and authoring tool for video games and applications developed by Firelight Technologies. It is able to play and mix sounds of diverse formats on many operating systems.

DirectSound is a deprecated software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system, superseded by XAudio2. It provides a low-latency interface to sound card drivers written for Windows 95 through Windows XP and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams. DirectSound was originally written for Microsoft by John Miles.

application programming interface in Apple's macOS and iOS

libGDX is a free and open-source game-development application framework written in the Java programming language with some C and C++ components for performance dependent code. It allows for the development of desktop and mobile games by using the same code base. It is cross-platform, supporting Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS, BlackBerry and web browsers with WebGL support.

Sound server

number of digital signal processing presets for audio, found in Sound Blaster sound cards

Raylib (stylized as raylib) is a cross-platform open-source software development library. The library was made to create graphical applications and games.

DirectMusic is a deprecated component of the Microsoft DirectX API that allows music and sound effects to be composed and played and provides flexible interactive control over the way they are played. Architecturally, DirectMusic is a high-level set of objects, built on top of DirectSound, that allow the programmer to play sound and music without needing to get quite as low-level as DirectSound. DirectSound allows for the capture and playback of digital sound samples, whereas DirectMusic works with message-based musical data. Music can be synthesized either in hardware, in the Microsoft GS Wav

Audio middleware created by Audiokinetic.

PortAudio is an open-source computer library for audio playback and recording. It is a cross-platform library, so programs using it can run on many different computer operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. PortAudio supports Core Audio, ALSA, and MME, DirectSound, ASIO and WASAPI on Windows. Like other libraries whose primary goal is portability, PortAudio is written in the C programming language. It has also been implemented in the languages PureBasic and Lazarus/Free Pascal. PortAudio is based on a callback paradigm, similar to JACK and ASIO.

Open Sound Library for Embedded Systems

sound software development kit for video games

ClanLib is a video game SDK, supporting Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux, with partial support for mobile platforms. It has full hardware accelerated graphics support through OpenGL, and also a software renderer. ClanLib also helps in playing sound, using the Vorbis or MikMod libraries, and has classes for collision detection, GUIs, XML, networking, and other things that may be helpful to a game programmer.