playing music C++

[Woody1987]

Im writing a program which at some point will play any number of mp3 files. I want to use Alsa or pulseaudio (which do you recommend?) as the backend. I have the headers for both installed. Could someone write some basic C++ showing how to load an mp3 file and play it using either alsa or pulse or point me to a tutorial elsewhere? Thanks.

[monraaf]

I would recommend using a higher level framework such as GStreamer :) But if the choice is between alsa and pulse, I would probably use alsa since it seems more widespread, at least in the Linux world that is.

[Woody1987]

how would gstreamer work? does it use alsa? or can i specify what it uses? or is it different entirely to both alsa and pulse?

[monraaf]

GStreamer is different, what you do is create a pipeline, put elements in it (e.g filesrc decodebin audioconvert alsasink) link the elements together and run the pipeline, it will run the whole media pipeline in a different thread.

[Woody1987]

ok thx, could you point me to any good tutorials on this?

[monraaf]

Sure.

http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/data/doc/gstreamer/head/manual/html/index.html

[Woody1987]

sweet, thx

[SledgeHammer_999]

how would gstreamer work? does it use alsa? or can i specify what it uses? or is it different entirely to both alsa and pulse?

yes you can specify Gstreamer what to use. The sink-element of your pipeline controls where the audio is outputted(when you're familiar with gstreamer terminology you'll understand what I am talking about).

[Woody1987]

Having looked over some of the documentation ive noticed that its all in C, im hoping to make a QT app which requires c++. Is it possible to use gstreamer with c++?

[monraaf]

Surely you can use C in a C++ program.

[JordyD]

Surely you can use C in a C++ program.

It's ugly, in my experience. At least if you're trying to do something Object-Oriented.

[gorilla]

im hoping to make a QT app which requires c++.

Assuming you're not talking about Quicktime, a good choice for you might be Phonon instead of GStreamer, as it is Qt's and Kde's own sound API, included in Qt since v4.4. You'll find examples and short demo applications in the Qt documentation, and there are a number of audio players using Phonon to be found at qt-apps.org

[poisonkiller]

You may try Gstreamermm, C++ bindings for Gstreamer. Unfortunately it is not in Jaunty's repositorys, but is in Karmic's, so you'll have to download it from there.