[LAD] Libraries for simple audio programming, libao, other options?

Hi, About a week ago, out of boredom, I started working on little retro-styled '80s kind of video game, written in a pretty simple-minded way with gnome, and the graphics done just by using line drawing primitives. It was just something to do, I didn't imagine it would amount to anything. Well, it's turning out surprisingly well (not great, but better than I was expecting.) So now I'm thinking to add sound, but apart from some MIDI programming, I really haven't done any audio programming before (unless you count some Extended BASIC code on a ti99/4a back in the '80s -- and nobody would count that.) So, I found libao ( http://xiph.org/ao/doc/ ) which looks nice and simple, and the sample program I tried ( http://xiph.org/ao/doc/ao_example.c ) worked right off the bat, and the idea of synthesizing my own sounds by constructing waveforms using sine waves is appealing for a retro styled app like mine (though I have no experience doing that and only a vague memory of trigonometry), but I wonder about how to mix sound (add the waveforms, I guess) and construct them on the fly (or trigger pre-computed chunks of audio). In the example code, it plays a one second chunk of audio with one library call initiating the playback. So, I imagine that for a game, in order to satisfy the real-time-ish requirements, I'd instead construct maybe 1/10th or 1/20th second chunks, which would be queued up in my program for playback, and whenever some event happens which demands some sound be produced _right now_ (like the user presses the "fire" button, and so needs some bleeping laser gun sounds to be produced) I would then start adding (arithmetic addition) laser-gun-waveform-data into whatever chunks were already in the queue, and so out would come the sound... Does that seem like a reasonable approach? By chopping the sound up into 1/10t or 1/20th second chunks, am I apt to cause distortion of some kind? Is there some other library I might be better off with? (I looked at SDL, but it seems heavily tilted towards graphics, and I already have the graphics stuff going alright under just regular old gnome.) I might also want to playback some ogg encoded files for maybe prerecorded sound effects and music to be mixed in with the synthesized sound effects. libao won't do that by itself, but I think there are some other libs on xiph.org that do that, but I'm not sure how well they'd accomodate mixing random bits of sound in with them. Saw this: http://www.underbit.com/products/mad/ fixed point mpeg decoder library... Not sure how easy it'd be to mix in other sounds with its output. Maybe just decode into memory buffer. Anyway, just looking for suggestions, esp. if what I've described so far seems wrong. -- steve __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com