libaudiodecoder provides a common interface for low-level compressed audio file decoding on Windows and Mac OS X, giving you access to raw audio samples. Wrapping the audio APIs provided by Windows and Mac OS X has important benefits:
- Portability: One piece of code compiles and runs on both operating systems.
- Reliability: The native audio APIs on each OS tend to be fairly bug-free.
- Cost: Using the native platform APIs allows you to avoid shipping MP3 and AAC decoders (like ffmpeg and libmad) with your application. Bundling such a decoder often requires royalty payments to the software patent holders. Fortunately, Windows and Mac OS X already come with licensed decoders for applications to use instead, and so that's what libaudiodecoder wraps. (This is not legal advice and we are not lawyers.)
In more technical terms, we wrap the ExtAudioFile API (CoreAudio) on Mac OS X, and the Media Foundation API that's been part of Windows since Vista. Unfortunately, it turns out that Media Foundation only works for decoding audio in Windows 7 and greater.
class AudioDecoder {
/** Construct a decoder for a given audio file.
@param filename A UTF-8 string containing the full path to the audio file to open.
*/
AudioDecoder(const std::string filename);
virtual ~AudioDecoder();
/** Opens the file for decoding */
int open();
/** Seek to a sample in the file */
int seek(int sampleIdx);
/** Read a maximum of 'size' samples of audio into buffer.
Samples are always returned as 32-bit floats, with stereo interlacing.
Returns the number of samples read. */
int read(int size, const SAMPLE *buffer);
/** Get the number of audio samples in the file. This will be a good estimate of the
number of samples you can get out of read(), though you should not rely on it
being perfectly accurate always. (eg. it might be slightly inaccurate with VBR MP3s)*/
inline int numSamples() const;
/** Get the number of channels in the audio file */
inline int channels() const;
/** Get the sample rate of the audio file (samples per second) */
inline int sampleRate() const;
/** Get the duration of the audio file (seconds) */
inline float duration() const;
/** Get the current playback position in samples */
inline int positionInSamples() const;
/** Get a list of the filetypes supported by the decoder, by extension */
static std::vector<std::string> supportedFileExtensions()
};For the complete API, please see audiodecoderbase.h. Please note that at present, all API calls are blocking and none are considered real-time safe. For best performance, please do not call read() or any other libaudiodecoder function from inside your audio callback.
| Windows (MediaFoundation) | Mac OS X (CoreAudio) | |
| MP3 | Yes* | Yes |
| AAC (M4A) | Yes* | Yes |
| WMA | Yes* | Yes |
| WAVE (16-bit int) | Yes | Yes |
| WAVE (24-bit, 32-bit int) | No | Yes |
* Requires Windows 7+ or greater
If you require support for all the different types of WAVE files (different encodings, bit depths, etc.), check out libsndfile. It should also be noted that DRM encrypted files are not supported on any platform.
The "examples" directory currently contains playsong, which demonstrates how to decode an MP3 file with libaudiodecoder and play out the soundcard with PortAudio. The example requires PortAudio and libaudiodecoder installed, and can be built with the project files provided for XCode 3 or greater on Mac OS X and Visual Studio 2008 on Windows. Please see the README is the playsong directory for more compilation instructions.
libaudiodecoder compiles with CMake. Install that before proceeding.
Compiling on Windows
Open a command prompt and run vcvarsall.bat for the Visual Studio compiler version you wish to use. For example, to compile with Visual Studio 2015 ("MSVC 14.0"), you would run:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\vc\vcvarsall.bat"
cmake .
cmake --build .
(or open libaudiodecoder.sln in Visual Studio)
General Tips and Compiling on Mac OS X
To compile libaudiodecoder in debugging configuration, run:
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug .
cmake --build .
To configure a release build, use:
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .
cmake --build .
- March 2024:
- Replaced SCons with CMake (3.10+) as the build system.
- Removed Windows Vista-specific build option (Windows 7 now required, but you can hack Vista support back in, if needed).
- Mac build is untested with CMake but should work (patches welcome).
libaudiodecoder was developed primarily with Windows and Mac OS X in mind. Because most application developers on these platforms build and ship their own 3rd party libraries with their products, API changes will be noticed at compile time or during testing. We make no guarantees about the stability of the API at this point, though it's not likely to change too much.
All strings in the API are assumed to be UTF-8 encoded.
libaudiodecoder was originally created by RJ Ryan, Bill Good, and Albert Santoni from code we wrote for Mixxx. We later refactored the code and rolled it into a separate library for use in BeatCleaver by Oscillicious. By sharing this code, we hope other developers will benefit from it in the same way open source has helped us.
Copyright (c) 2010-2024 Albert Santoni, Bill Good, RJ Ryan
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The text above constitutes the entire libaudiodecoder license; however, the Oscillicious community also makes the following non-binding requests:
Any person wishing to distribute modifications to the Software is requested to send the modifications to the original developer so that they can be incorporated into the canonical version. It is also requested that these non-binding requests be included along with the license above.