The audio programming bookRichard Charles Boulanger
The audio programming book
by Richard Charles Boulanger · first published 2011
12mentions
4recommended by
9HN commenters
2016–2025first – last mentioned
44% recommend56% neutral
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Boulanger and Lazzarini "The Audio Programming Book" - great if you want to start working straight away in C Boulanger - "The Csound Book" (another classic language I still use today) Greenbaum and Barzel - "Audio Anecdotes". A fascinating series of…
on “The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music (2006)” ↗I recently picked up 'The Audio Programming Book' [0] and so far, I am really liking it. But I am not sure which resource to pick after reading that. Can you recommend me some audio programming resources which are beginner friendly? [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book…
on “Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?” ↗I've programmed my own simple synthesizer [1] by following along "The Audio Programming Book" [0]. It gives a concise explanation for the techniques and theories for signal processing while showing practical code examples. [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book [1]: https://github.com/badosu/sine_synth.lv2
on “Ask HN: “Write your own” or “Build your own” software projects” ↗…as a learning/prototyping tool). The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads is a good companion here if you want inner workings. You might be able to snag a PDF copy online to see if it's for you. Audio Programming Book is entirely in C and can be a bit of a pain to get things working in C if you're new to programming (although highly worth the initial struggle if you're looking at it with a career in mind), although…
on “Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?” ↗Reading 'The Audio Programming Book' also clarified the concept of OOP for me. There was a small section where function pointers in C structs was discussed. Just after that, there was a section on struct classes in C++ which made it clear…
on “Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?” ↗I've not read this myself but I've seen The Audio Programming Book[0] cited frequently in "Where do I start with audio programming?" questions. [0]https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Programming-Book-MIT-Press/dp/0...
on “Faust – A language for audio applications and plugins” ↗…simple music player. It works fine but I want to learn the deeper concepts behind how computer audio works. I am a CS student and I know C/C++, Python, and high school mathematics. I came across 'The Audio Programming Book' [2] which seems suited for my level. Can you recommend me some more related resources? [0] https://openal-soft.org/ [1] http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/ [2] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book
on “Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?” ↗…into learning how computer audio works. Learning to program things like mono -> stereo conversion, panning the audio, normalizing, generating binary sound files,.. Currently going through a book (The Audio Programming Book) for all of this, doing it in C and then trying to make my own version in Go. The reason I say "define significant" is because these are all new skills I am acquiring - but I'm doing so just for the…
on “How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner (2012)” ↗…JUCE and just started figuring things out. I generally learn best by having a real thing to build; and then finding the resources I need when I get stuck. I buy books aspirationally (I have bought the Audio Programming Book as well come to think of it) - so I often end up with many books on subjects that interests me, without learning much from them.
on “Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?” ↗I've used The Audio Programming book in conjunction with "Musimathics" http://musimathics.com/ to write many parts of GoAudio. (https://github.com/DylanMeeus/GoAudio).
on “Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?” ↗…Processing, which I see a couple of other people have also recommended: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/pasp/ But if you're using an existing computer music programming environment like Csound (used in The Audio Programming Book), SuperCollider, or PureData, you can make a mini-synth which takes input from the computer keyboard without any of that stuff! (Stay away from Max/MSP; it's proprietary.) The most fun I've had with…
on “Ask HN: How to get started with audio programming?” ↗I'm getting back in to audio programming, starting off with Pd[1] and reading Miller Puckette's book[2]. I'm planning on writing some low-level C libraries afterwards, using The Audio Programming Book[3] as a guide [1] https://puredata.info [2] https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm [3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262014465/the-audio-programming...
on “Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)” ↗