Best audio playback api for C/C++ under Linux?

Question

What is the best audio playback api for C/C++ for Linux, preferably free/open source? I need it for embedded Linux, so I'm looking for something as lightweight as possible with not to many dependencies?

Answer 1

That depends on what you mean by "audio". If you just want to play back raw PCM sample data, look at using the ALSA API directly. If you want to decode and play back encoded sound, you need to look at libraries supporting the required format(s), of course.

Answer 2

PulseAudio has been adopted by the major distributions and it looks like it is the upcoming Linux Audio standard as it is more flexible than ALSA. Here's an article about why you should care about PulseAudio (and how to start doing it).