Greetings, Haskell folks! I'm working on a toy program for drum synthesis. This has lead me to explore the various sound-related libraries in Hackage. Along the way, I've learned several things: 1. There's a lot of Haskell sound libraries, but no agreement on how to represent buffers of audio data. 2. Some of the most useful sound libraries aren't listed in Hackage's "Sound" section, including HCodecs, SDL-mixer and hogg. 3. The Haskell OpenAL bindings are great, but ALUT has been removed from MacOS 10.5. Of course, a pure-Haskell version of ALUT would be pretty easy to write, and it could be used as a fallback. 4. '[[a]]' is _not_ a good representation for multi-channel audio data. Manipulating even 10 seconds of audio is noticeably slow. 5. HCodecs is probably the best library for reading WAVE files. It uses 'DiffUArray Int a' to represent audio data, and not '[[a]]'. It also supports MIDI and SoundFont, which is quite handy. 6. YampaSynth looks really cool, and it might be possible to turn it into a reusable MIDI synthesizer library for use with HCodecs. This would be extremely useful: it would provide a basis for all kinds of crazy MIDI-based programming in Haskell. At the end of this e-mail, you can find a list of Haskell sound libraries and their supported audio formats. What would the ideal Haskell sound API look like? Personally, I would love to see: a. Something like HCodecs's Data.Audio as the basic sound format. Data.Audio is an array-based API, and it supports converting between a wide range of common sample formats. I don't know how fast this is, but it already exists, and it's used by YampaSynth. b. OpenAL for sound playback, with a portable version of ALUT. This may require writing a pure-Haskell version of ALUT. c. Utility functions to convert Data.Audio to OpenAL.AL.Buffer. d. An easy-to-use API for audio processing. It might be possible to start with something like Jack's 'mainMono' and 'mainStereo' functions, which map a function over an audio stream. Other nice-to-have features might include: e. A standard MIDI format, based on either the HCodecs package or the midi package. (HCodecs is used by YampaSynth, and the midi package is used by alsa-midi.) f. A modular version of YampaSynth which can convert MIDI data structures into Data.Audio values. It looks like Haskell could be a really sweet audio programming environment with just a bit of integration work. What do folks think? Are there other libraries I should look at more closely? Other features that should be included in an ideal audio API? Thank you for your advice and feedback! Cheers, Eric Haskell audio libraries Reading and writing sound files: HCodecs: (Audible a) => DiffUArray Int a hsndfile: MArray with Float and Double HSoundFile: [[Double]] ALUT: OpenAL.AL.Buffer WAVE: [[Int32]] Playing sounds: OpenAL: Ptr UInt8, Ptr Int16, 1-N channels SDL-mixer: ForeignPtr ChunkStruct, ForeignPtr MusicStruct Sound processing libraries: dsp: Array a, [a] jack: Operates via mapping functions mainMono :: (CFloat -> IO CFloat) -> IO () mainStereo :: ((CFloat, CFloat) -> IO (CFloat, CFloat)) -> IO () MIDI-based: HCodecs: Reads and writes MIDI files midi: Reads and writes MIDI files alsa-midi: Uses midi library YampaSynth: Stand-alone program Special-purpose APIs only (FFIs, etc.): hCsound: CsoundPtr hsc3: UGen No public sound-buffer API: hbeat: The relevant source files are missing! hogg: Very low-level API for Ogg internals only libmpd: No sound buffer API sonic-visualizer: No sound buffer API truelevel: Stand-alone program (uses WAVE) wavconvert: Stand-alone program