Today, almost every computer, tablet and phone comes with audio input and output. Computer games and many other kinds of applications would be unthinkable without sound. Yet, the C++ language has no notion of it. Literature on audio in C++ is sparse. For even the simplest possible audio functionality, programmers need to deal with a confusing landscape of complex platform-specific APIs and proprietary 3rd party libraries. But audio in C++ doesn’t have to be hard!
First, we show how audio signals can be digitally represented in C++, covering basic concepts such as channels, audio buffers, PCM, and sample rate. We explain the principles of communicating with your soundcard and playing, recording, reading and writing audio data. In the second half of the talk, we will discuss a proposal to add a minimal, modern audio API to the C++ standard library. We will show the basic design, the current state of the implementation, and simple example apps. We finish with an update on the current state of this proposal.
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