Sound processing in C++ on Windows - a nudge in the right direction

Question

I want to write a simple sound editor with a very specific purpose: cutting and re-gluing an audio file (which will contain spoken prose) in such a way that each sentence is repeated N times. (This is for foreign language learning.)

I don't want to use an existing sound editor because I would like to tailor the GUI specifically for this narrow task, reducing the amount of motions and clicks to a minimum.

Unfortunately I don't have any experience whatsoever in working with sound. I was wondering about recommendations for C++ libraries/APIs on Windows that would enable me to:

• read in an audio file (mp3 or wav)
• select a portion from "here" to "here"
• listen to it
• append it to a new file
• write the whole thing out as mp3 (or at least wav)

Also any general thoughts are very welcome (this is completely unknown territory for me so if you have had any stumbling blocks and mistakes you don't want others to repeat, please do share).

Answer 1

I have previously been quite happy about http://www.portaudio.com/, which is a nice platform independent wrapper to the sound hardware (low latency recording and playback). For reading / writing mp3s I have used LAME http://lame.sourceforge.net which is also supported support on pretty much all popular platforms.

You might also want to check out the source code of Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/, which does what you want and a lot more.