Adding sounds is a great way to boost “completeness” feeling of a game. And it isn’t that hard! You will have to hear through a lot of chaff, but it is possible to find quality SFX to match your environment. Youtube has freebie royalty-free music that you can download.
SDL Mixer
Offers straight-forward flow and a variety of formats to load via 3rd party libraries.
- Initialize Audio subsystem of SDL.
- Initialize Mixer state.
- Load resources.
-
Set background
Musicor playChunkswhenever it is appropriate, presumably near your event loop.
OpenAL
Gives you OpenGL-flavored 3D positional audio and ability to play Haskell-generated buffers.
- Open Device.
- Create Context and make it current.
- Load resources into Buffers.
- Create static sources for music, UI etc. and attach Buffers to them.
- Create dynamic sources and keep them synced to world/absoulute or relative positions.
MIDI
Not quite useful for games, but comes handy for livecoding and other performances. Can be very powerful when combined with professional sound synthesis software.
Cross-platform compatibility is less of an issue, but PortMIDI (and its PortMIDI-simple wrapper) got your back if that is what you need.
Linux-only users can directly for alsa-seq directly.
MIDI is not only a sound IO protocol, but also a controller/interface protocol. While simple, it can add multi-dimensional parameter variation to your code, even if completely unrelated to multimedia.