Application

Like I said example applications are very simple. With Every library I tried to write playback and record example. If you can use blocking API interface there is blocking example also. In these Examples I use sndfile because API is super easy to use and I could test with WAV. So no troubles big bobbles approach.

Code

I won’t be posting code here it can be found on Github repository. I tried to be super clear as they are examples and added comments as needed but if you don’t get glue fault is all mine.

Portaudio

Supported outputs: Alsa, Oss, Jack, Mac OS X CoreAudio and Many Windows Audio API’s

Why do want to use something else than ALSA? If you need to support other platforms than Linux you get idea of cross platform API for audio. Portaudio is hidden gem of Linux audio libraries. It’s stable as can get. Portaudio has blocking and callback support. It has Float 32-bit Int 32-, 16- and 8-bit input/output. I tries to be very high end in every corner. Also licensing is very liberal.  For a while It’s has seen slowing development  because main developers have something else to do in life.

For me biggest no-no for me was lack of Pulseaudio support (I go so upset that I wrote Pulseaudio  hostApi for Portaudio but that is worth of another blog post). Portaudio supports Windows, Linux and Mac OS X so it’s good choice if you need same quality audio in every platform.

Biggest minus in Portaudio is there ain’t much applications using it. There is some highlights like Mixxx and Audacity. Rest of the list can be found here. Why it’s not more popular I can’t say because it’s easy to use.

Summary: Simple but powerful API for I/O which I can recommend. So go and see examples if it’s for you and documentation from official pages. Next time we get on Pulseaudio.