Hearing is one of the few basic senses that we humans have along with the other our abilities to see, smell, taste and touch. If we couldn't hear, the world as we know it would be less interesting and colorful to us. It would be a total silence - a scary thing, even to imagine. And speaking makes our life so much fun, because what else can be better than talking to our friends and family? Also, we're able to listen to our favorite music wherever we are, thanks to computers and headphones. With the help of tiny microphones integrated into our phones and laptops we are now able to talk to the people around the world from any place with an Internet connection. But computer hardware alone isn't enough - it is computer software that really defines the way how and when the hardware should operate. Operating Systems provide the means for that to the apps that want to use computer's audio capabilities. In real use-cases audio data usually goes the long way from one end to another, being transformed and (un)compressed on-the-fly, attenuated, filtered, and so on. But in the end it all comes down to just 2 basic processes: playing the sound or recording it.
Today we're going to discuss how to make use of the API that popular OS provide: this is an essential knowledge if you want to create an app yourself which works with audio I/O. But there's just one problem standing on our way: there is no single API that all OS support. In fact, there are completely different API, different approaches, slightly different logic. We could just use some library which solves all those problems for us, but in that case we won't understand what's really going on under the hood - what's the point? But humans are built the way that we sometimes want to dig a little bit deeper, to learn a little bit more than what just lies on the surface. That's why we're going to learn the API that OS provide by default: ALSA (Linux), PulseAudio (Linux), WASAPI (Windows), OSS (FreeBSD), CoreAudio (macOS).
