Have any of you guys done much coding involving playback of music files? The Honor's program I'm in requires me to write a thesis. I'm a computer science major with a theatre minor and I was thinking about writing a program to play sound cues for use in live theatre.

I'm only a sophomore so I'm not about to start coding or anything, but do any of you guys know any good libraries that I could look into? I just need something that will allow me to play multiple audio files simultaneously and allow for volume changes during playback.

I'm open to pretty much any language. I'd prefer something multi-platform, but that still isn't that important. Are any libraries or resources coming to mind?
Audacity comes to mind.
Yes, I've used Audacity in engineering sounds before, but that's not what I'm looking for. I want something I can include to write my own playback program. After some more looking around, I found a library called FMOD. It's supposedly more for game dev, but it looks like a possibility. Have any of you heard of it or used it before?

Pre-post edit:
Or, wait, did you mean just dive through Audacity's source? I suppose that's a possibility.
foamy3 wrote:
Yes, I've used Audacity in engineering sounds before, but that's not what I'm looking for. I want something I can include to write my own playback program. After some more looking around, I found a library called FMOD. It's supposedly more for game dev, but it looks like a possibility. Have any of you heard of it or used it before?

Pre-post edit:
Or, wait, did you mean just dive through Audacity's source? I suppose that's a possibility.


I meant just use Audacity, or write something for its plugin system.
Ohhh, I see.

Audacity isn't really great for playback. In a show, you usually have between 10 to 30 cues that you need to be able to fade up, fade out, or cross-fade as soon as the stage manager says 'go.' Audacity could work if you were working for predetermined times to fade and stuff, but it wouldn't be practical for a live show. You also need to have a playlist of songs to go through for pre-show, intermission, and post-show. I don't think Audacity is really up for that.

The best equivalent program I've found is Qlab (for mac) but it's a little harder to use for pre-configured fades and there is no support for intermission-style playback.
I've had some interesting experiences scripting for WinAmp; you might want to look into the powerfulness of their API.
  
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