Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] New in this world...
From: Josh Green (jgreen_AT_users.sourceforge.net)
Date: Sun Jun 03 2001 - 11:14:55 EEST
Menthor of All Things wrote:
>
> Hello All!
>
> I`m very happy to be in this list! I`m reading the old posted messages and
> finding a lot of cool stuff...
>
> But I need one help from the masters here... (Sorry...)
>
> I`m starting with audio programming. I use audio aplication but I want to
> develop some others things. Can someone help me to find references and
> introdutory thinks on this? Any type of information still important to me.
> Any books, URLs, texts and pizzas will be carefully apreciated...
>
I find it hard to give any particular advice as I don't know what you
want to create or what skills you already have.
Personally, I program in C. Many others program in C++. There are also
several scripting languages that give you access to audio services.
Deciding what language you want to program in is a start, generally
speaking for hi performance applications, C or C++ should be used.
Once you figure out what language you want to program with, you then
need to decide what audio services you wan't to access.
Digital audio play/record (PCM, Pulse Coded Modulation)
MIDI sequencer data
The current sound system for Linux is Open Sound System (OSS).
http://www.opensound.com is the web site for this audio system. Follow
the "API Specs" link to take you to some documentation on the OSS API.
If you are planning on writing a hi performance application or want to
do MIDI sequencer related programming, you might want to look at ALSA
(Advanced Linux Sound Architecture). http://www.alsa-project.org.
Unfortunately documentation on ALSA is currently rather outdated.
The best way to find out how to use ALSA is to read code from other
programs. This goes for other things too, I find the best way to learn
how to do things is to look at other peoples code. There are pleanty of
open source free programs out there that can be used as learning tools.
> Well, sorry for the inconvenience and for my poor english (hum... i`m
> brazilian...) :-)
>
No problem. I've heard that Linux is pretty big down in Brazil. My
brother went there as an American exchange student, he now speaks
Portuguese quite well and married a Brazilian. Someday I will visit
Brazil to see why my brother likes it so much :) He offered to translate
my program the Smurf Sound Font Editor (http://smurf.sourceforge.net),
although I'm not sure he would be able to entirely, because he is not
very computer or music oriented. Good luck learning to write Linux audio
applications.
Josh Green
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