PortAudio/portaudio

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

2135 stars · 402 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

PortAudio is a cross-platform open-source C library for real-time audio input and output. It supports callback-based and blocking read/write audio processing across many host APIs including ALSA, Core Audio, WASAPI, and ASIO.

Use cases

• play and record audio in a cross-platform C application
• capture microphone input in real time
• play back audio with low latency
• write a cross-platform audio engine
• interface with ALSA, Core Audio, or WASAPI from portable code

When to choose

• you need portable real-time audio I/O in C or C++ across Windows, macOS, and Linux
• you want a mature, widely-adopted audio library with many host API backends
• you need both callback-driven and blocking audio models

When to avoid

• you need high-level audio mixing, effects, or decoding rather than raw I/O
• you are working in a managed language with better-native audio bindings available
• you need MIDI-only functionality

Facets

library · maturity stable

audio-processing sdk cross-platform developer-tools cross-platform windows cpp c real-time-audio audio-io alsa coreaudio wasapi callback-audio audio linux macos

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="PortAudio/portaudio")