Faun Audio Library

Faun is a high-level C API for playback of sound & music in games & demos. It is a modestly sized library designed to use pre-packaged audio and is not intended for synthesizer or audio manipulation applications. The shared library is about half the size the SDL 2 & Allegro 5 mixer libraries.

The following audio formats can be played:

• FLAC
• Ogg Vorbis
• rFX (sfxr synthesizer)
• WAVE

The following operating systems are supported:

• Android (via AAudio)
• Linux (via PulseAudio)
• Windows (via Windows Audio Session)

Features include:

• Support for audio embedded in larger files.
• Playback of stream fragments.
• Fading volume in & out.
• Source playback from a queue of buffers.
• Signaling when a sound is finished playing.
• A bytecode language for running simple playback sequences.

At this time the library does not support:

• Sample rates other than 44100 & 22050 Hz.
• More than two channels.
• 3D audio.

NOTE: This library is under development and the API is subject to change.

Example usage:

#include <faun.h>

int main() {
    FaunSignal sig;

    faun_startup(64, 8, 2, 0, "Faun Test");

    // Start some music.
    faun_playStream(8, "path/to/music.ogg", 0, 0,
                    FAUN_PLAY_ONCE | FAUN_SIGNAL_DONE);

    // Load and play a sound.
    faun_loadBuffer(0, "path/to/sound.flac", 0, 0);
    faun_playSource(0, 0, FAUN_PLAY_ONCE);

    // Wait for music to finish.
    faun_waitSignal(&sig);

    faun_shutdown();
}

Resource Management

Sources are used to play audio samples completely stored in memory buffers. Streams are used to play longer sounds by continually decoding small parts of the file into memory. While the stream implemention uses sources & buffers internally, for the API user streams are treated as separate resources.

The maximum number of source buffers, sources, & streams that can be used by a program is set once using faun_startup(). This reserves slots which are specified by index (zero to limit-1) which may be used as desired.

Sources and Buffers

Before a source can play, buffers must be loaded using faun_loadBuffer(). The faun_playSource() function can then be used to play 1-3 buffers in series as a single sound.

Streams

The faun_playStream() & faun_playStreamPart() functions are used to play streams.

NOTE: Currently only Ogg Vorbis files can be streamed.

Build Instructions

Linux Dependencies

The Vorbis and PulseAudio libraries (with headers) must be installed.

Fedora:

sudo dnf install libvorbis-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel

Ubuntu:

sudo apt install libvorbis-dev libpulse-dev

Build for Linux

The following commands will build and install the shared Faun library. Use the --static configure option to build a static library.

./configure --prefix /usr
make
sudo make install