libsoundio VS ZLib

Compare libsoundio vs ZLib and see what are their differences.

libsoundio

C library for cross-platform real-time audio input and output (by andrewrk)

ZLib

A massively spiffy yet delicately unobtrusive compression library. (by madler)
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libsoundio ZLib
15 49
1,833 5,219
- -
1.8 8.9
2 months ago 3 days ago
C C
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

libsoundio

Posts with mentions or reviews of libsoundio. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-11-15.
  • How can I record and cut a sound in c++
    2 projects | /r/synthdiy | 15 Nov 2022
    http://libsound.io is a great cross platform library for reading and writing to sound cards. i have used it successfully on macos and i’m sure it supports linux and possibly windows too. you will probably also need lib audio for reading and writing to files.
  • Learn Enough C to Survive
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Oct 2022
    Hmm... after some research it seems that I've misunderstood Zig's situation a bit. Zig has introduced null-terminated string types a couple of years ago, but still encourages you to do most string operations with slices instead. Let me explain:

    Zig's string literals (which you create with parenthesis like "Hello world!") are null-terminated byte arrays, expressed as the type const [N:0]u8 (where the :0 tells you that it's null-terminated), whereas the more typical array might be written as const [N]u8. The reason for this feature is not because the language wants you to use null-terminated strings, but because these static strings need to be stored in the global data section of the ELF executable, and these require you to use null-termination. But if you want to do any mutable operation with this string, you need to convert this into a proper slice (ptr + size). And it seems like Zig developers don't really use null-terminated types that much at the API level, but use it for things like C interop or cases where you really need it for special optimizations.

    Noting that from the PR that introduced this feature, Andrew Kelley writes:

    > I think you will find that the Zig community in general (and especially myself) agrees with you on this [null-terminated strings being fragile], and APIs in general should prefer slices to null terminated pointers. Even if you are using Zig to create a C library, and even in actual C libraries, I would recommend pointer and length arguments rather than null terminated pointers, like this: https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/blob/1.1.0/soundio/so...

    > That being said, I want to repeat what I said earlier about null terminated pointers: A null terminated array is not inherently an evil C concept that is intruding in the Zig language. It's a general data storage technique that is valid for some memory constrained use cases. I also stumbled on a Real Actual Use Case inside LLVM. The bottom line for me is that null terminated pointers exist in the real world, and especially in systems programming. You can see this in interfaces with the operating system in the standard library...

    So he acknowledges null-terminated strings can certainly be useful in certain situations outside of legacy reasons, which is good to know. And Zig creating a special type for this shows that a good systems language needs to be designed to accommodate the needs of the outside world.

  • Ask HN: Cross platform method for accessing system audio output?
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Aug 2022
    Perhaps you could use either http://libsound.io/ or SDL2 game library + SDLAudioIn (http://burningsmell.org/sdl_audioin/) which provides low-level APIs to access operating-system sound systems like Alsa, PulseAudio, PipeWire, and CoreAudio (not sure how well it is supported by SDL2).

    Comparison: https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/wiki/libsoundio-vs-SD...

  • Is programming truly for me?
    5 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 3 Jul 2022
    Fun fact: Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language, kind of created it so he could work on audio processing.
  • Jam live with your friends with Svelte!
    2 projects | /r/sveltejs | 22 Oct 2021
    I listened to the Co-recursive podcast the other day that featured Andrew Kelley, the creator of the Zig programming language. Before Zig he developed Libsoundio - https://github.com/andrewrk/Libsoundio, to solve problems around realtime audio.
  • Mach Engine: The future of graphics (with Zig)
    4 projects | /r/Zig | 18 Oct 2021
    Audio will probably come later, but libsoundio will be the first thing in terms of groundwork. Integrating that in the same way we've integrated GLFW, so you can just cross compile and get cross-platform audio to boot.
  • Manually Playing PCM Audio
    2 projects | /r/cpp_questions | 6 Aug 2021
    Sound data is double-buffered by the operating system. The OS gives you one buffer to write into while it plays the other, and then they swap. If you want to write real-time audio (i.e. a program that will actually play sound itself with no libraries), you need to either read up on your operating system's kernel API for audio, or use a thin abstraction layer like libsoundio. You could also use a fully fledged library like IrrKlang that just does everything for you.
  • C Deep
    80 projects | dev.to | 27 Feb 2021
    libsoundio - Library for cross-platform, real-time audio input and output. Has a range of back-ends. MIT
  • Cross platform audio frameworks in Cpp?
    6 projects | /r/cpp | 11 Jan 2021

ZLib

Posts with mentions or reviews of ZLib. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-25.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing libsoundio and ZLib you can also consider the following projects:

zstd - Zstandard - Fast real-time compression algorithm

LZ4 - Extremely Fast Compression algorithm

LZMA - (Unofficial) Git mirror of LZMA SDK releases

Onion - C library to create simple HTTP servers and Web Applications.

Snappy - A fast compressor/decompressor

Minizip-ng - Fork of the popular zip manipulation library found in the zlib distribution.

miniaudio - Audio playback and capture library written in C, in a single source file.

brotli - Brotli compression format

zlib-ng - zlib replacement with optimizations for "next generation" systems.

libarchive - Multi-format archive and compression library

LZFSE - LZFSE compression library and command line tool

portaudio - PortAudio is a cross-platform, open-source C language library for real-time audio input and output.