Linux, C++ audio capturing (just microphone) library

Question

I'm developing a musical game, it's like a singstar but instead of singing, you have to play the recorder. It's called oFlute, and it's still in early development stage.

In the game, I capture the microphone input, then run a simple FFT analysis and compare the results to typical recorder's frequencies, thus getting the played note.

At the beginning, the audio library I was using was RtAudio, but I don't remember why I switched to PortAudio, which is what I'm currently using. The problem is that, from time to time, either it crashes randomly or stops capturing, like if there were no sound coming from the microphone.

My question is, what's the best option to capture microphone input on Linux? I just need to open, read, and close a flow of bytes from the microphone.

I've been reading this guide, and (un)surprisingly it says:

I don't think that PortAudio is very good API for Unix-like operating systems.

So, what do you recommend me?

Answer 1

PortAudio is a strange choice given the other options.

I would personally abstract away from everything and use GStreamer. Audio can be a horrible mess on Linux (speaking as a long term sufferer). Letting Gstreamer deal with that lets you forget about it, move along and not have to think about it again.

OpenAL is probably the most popular for game dev though and it should support most systems (although you will have "fun" getting it playing nice with PulseAudio).

I'd certainly make sure you're developing for the most popular setup (which is PulseAudio at the moment, I reckon) so you don't end up in a situation where you release and you're plunged into a pool of people moaning about the sound not working.

And don't listen to the nonsense about PulseAudio - it might be new and it might take up a few more resources than a barebones ALSA system but it's certainly not mired with latency issues. Asking people to remove it isn't an option with modern desktop distros as it's so tightly integrated (and useful too).