For doing cross-platform development, I would strongly recommend that
you use MinGW (or cygwin) in preference to Visual Studio Express.

MinGW is installed on our computers at work and its nice to work with. I tried installing it 2 years ago at home and I made a mess of it and gave up. I will certainly revisit it. Thanks.

I also would use PortAudio for what you describe, and have had good
experience with it on OSX.

That's reassuring! I finished compiling PortAudio on XP today, I'm just having trouble doing the Cabal install. I made a portaudio_x86.lib and .dll and blindly tried:

>cabal install portaudio --extra-include-dirs=...\portaudio\include --extra-lib-dirs=...\portaudio\build\msvc\Win32\Release

Where ... is the actual path shortened here. JVE has been kind to let me email him for help.

*shameless plug* you could also use hCsound, although it's probably
higher-level than what you're looking for. Installing on Windows is
tricky too, but you only need to do so once.

John

Seriously, I can't wait to play with all these Haskell libraries. As a beginner though I'm trying to work my way through the simple stuff yet.