CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++linuxmacosunixaudio
wrongusername
wrongusername

Reputation: 18918

Playing sound in C++ using native system calls?

So in Windows, you can use the PlaySound function to play an MP3 file in a C++ application. What would be some similar functions available for use in Mac OS X/Linux? I would also appreciate it if you could link to some sample Hello-World type programs demonstrating this.

Upvotes: 7

Views: 5830

Answers (3)

André Bergner
André Bergner

Reputation: 1439

Concerning Audio: Linux != Mac, so I will answer both separately.

MacOS uses the core audio framework for low level audio. Building on that there are several higher level APIs. If you just want to play a sound file the AV Foundation Framework is most likely the way to go. Here you find an example to build a simple app for iOS, which can be ported to MacOS easily.

For Linux the whole situation is quite delicate. There exist many different frameworks and libraries and it very unclear which is low and which is high level, since some of them are emulating the others. Basically there is ALSA and OSS for low level audio. Both of them are crap. Jack is aiming to provide a framework for professional audio but it's not very portable (at least if you are interested in embedded devices). Most Linux OS currently are using PulseAudio as their audio server, which has also a simple API for just playing a single sound and a very difficult API for low level stuff. And then there is the gstreamer library, which is rather portable and has a half way descent API and is especially designed for playing audio & video files and streams, and so probably the way to go on linux.

I personally recommend to use PortAudio, which is a library that provides – as the name states – an audio framework which is portable across several operating systems and audio frameworks. PortAudio is also well designed and has a simple but flexible API.

Upvotes: 3

hochl
hochl

Reputation: 12920

Well, I'm not sure if current desktops have some more advanced services/libraries that play audio files, but if you really want to do some low-level OS audio output, start looking here. Maybe this is a little too low-level for your needs.

Upvotes: 1

Ben Voigt
Ben Voigt

Reputation: 283614

You can just open("/dev/dsp") and write to it. That's as "native syscall" as you can get, I believe.

Upvotes: 5

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