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LabSound is a graph-based audio engine built in modern C++11. As a fork of the WebAudio implementation in Google's Chrome browser, LabSound implements many aspects of the WebAudio specification while extending its functionality with an improved API, new graph nodes, bugfixes, and performance improvements.
The engine is packaged as a batteries-included static library meant for integration in many types of software: games, visualizers, interactive installations, live coding environments, VST plugins, audio editing/sequencing applications, and more.
- Compatibility with the WebAudio API
- Audio asset loading via libnyquist
- Binaural audio via IRCAM HRTF database
- New audio effects and generators (ADSR, noise, stereo delay, and more)
- Signal analysis (both time & frequency)
- Offline graph processing & wav export
- High-quality realtime signal resampling
- Thread safety guarantees for multi-threaded apps (e.g. gui)
- Extensible base nodes for arbitrary DSP processing
- Microphone input
- SIMD accelerated channel mixing routines
- DSP primitives including filters and delays
LabSound uses RtAudio as its hardware abstraction layer for realtime audio playback on desktop platforms. The repository hosts maintained project files for Visual Studio 2017, XCode 8, and CMake. While not actively supported, LabSound has been shown to run on other platforms including Linux (JACK via RtAudio), iOS (CoreAudio), and Android (OpenSL ES).
Users of LabSound are expected to compile LabSound from source. While most dependencies are included as code in the repository, libnyquist is bundled as a git submodule so it is required that new users clone the repository with the --recursive option.
The submodules can be fetched after a clone with git submodule update --init --recursive
LabSound and libnyquist require a C++11 compiler.
CMake can be used as an alternative to the vcproj and xcodeproj files bundled with the LabSound source distribution.
LabSound has a CMakeLists.txt at the root directory, and all the associated CMake files are in the cmake/ subfolder. A CMake based build will work out of the box on Windows, it is not yet tested on other platforms. If you use the CMake build, it will build everything to a folder named ../local/ build directory. As always with CMake, it is recommended that you do an out-of-source build.
LabSound is bundled with approximately 20 single-file samples. Project files can be found in the examples/ subfolder.
Users should link against liblabsound.a on OSX and labsound.lib on Windows. LabSound also requires symbols from libnyquist, although both the Visual Studio solution and the XCode workspace will build this dependency alongside the core library.
On OSX, new applications also require the following frameworks:
- Cocoa
- Accelerate
- CoreAudio
- AudioUnit
- AudioToolbox
- libnyquist.a
On Windows, new applications also require the following libraries:
- dsound.lib
- dxguid.lib
- winmm.lib
- libnyquist.lib
For convenience, LabSound.h is used as an index header file with all public nodes included for easy application development.
LabSound includes an HRTF implementation. This creates an additional dependency on a folder of impulse wav files when a PannerNode is configured to use PanningMode::HRTF. The constructor of PannerNode will take an additional path to the sample directory relative to the current working directory.
LabSound is derived from one of the original WebAudio implementations, but does not maintain full compatibility with the spec. In many cases, LabSound has deliberately deviated from the spec for performance or API usability reasons. This is expected to continue into the future as new functionality is added to the engine. It possible to reformulate most WebAudio API sample code written in JS as a LabSound sketch (modulo obvious architectual considerations of JavaScript vs C++).
LabSound is released under the simplified BSD 2 clause license. All LabSound dependencies are under similar permissive licenses. Further details are located in the LICENSE and COPYING files.