RustAudio/cpal

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

3913 stars · 535 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

CPAL is a low-level cross-platform audio input/output library written in Rust. It provides device enumeration, stream configuration, and building input/output streams across many platforms and backends.

Use cases

• capture microphone input in a Rust application
• play raw audio samples to speakers
• enumerate audio devices and their supported configurations
• build a low-latency audio stream with ASIO or JACK
• record system audio on macOS via loopback
• run audio I/O in the browser via Web Audio API

When to choose

• you need direct, low-level control over audio devices and streams in Rust
• you need cross-platform audio I/O including mobile and WebAssembly
• you need low-latency playback or capture with optional ASIO/JACK backends

When to avoid

• you just want simple high-level playback of audio files - use Rodio instead
• you need audio processing, mixing, or DSP features - cpal only handles I/O
• you are not working in Rust

Facets

library · maturity stable

audio-processing cross-platform windows wasm rust cross-platform audio-io playback recording alsa coreaudio wasapi jack pipewire low-level audio linux macos android ios

Member repositories

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