The audio programming book

What Hacker News says

1. nonrandomstringDec 2024
   Boulanger and Lazzarini "The Audio Programming Book" - great if you want to start working straight away in C

   Boulanger - "The Csound Book" (another classic language I still use today)

   Greenbaum and Barzel - "Audio Anecdotes". A fascinating series of 3 volumes with all sorts of wisdom on FX design, studio systems and composition

   Wilson, Cottle and Collins - "The Supercollider Book". In the style of The Csound Book, but with SC.

   Loy - "Musicmathics". A rare and much under-rated two volume set on the equations behind audio DSP

   Bilbao - "Numerical Sound Synthesis". A hard but rewarding journey to understanding audio physics as linear diff systems and implementing them efficiently in C, Goes well with Perry Cook's stuff.

   Benson - "Music a mathematical offering" Very unusual book that analyses many subjects in music physics. Equations but no code.

   Miranda "Computer Sound Design". More about music synthesis than "sound design" imho, but has some interesting fringe methods like cellular autonoma and genetic algorithms.

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2. Flex247AMay 2021
   I recently picked up 'The Audio Programming Book' [0] and so far, I am really liking it. But I am not sure which resource to pick after reading that. Can you recommend me some audio programming resources which are beginner friendly?

   [0] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book

   Edit: My goal is to make a mini-synth which takes input from the computer keyboard.

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3. Flex247AMay 2021
   Reading 'The Audio Programming Book' also clarified the concept of OOP for me. There was a small section where function pointers in C structs was discussed. Just after that, there was a section on struct classes in C++ which made it clear why data members should be grouped with their related functions.
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4. adityatbMay 2021
   If you're new to programming, it might also help you to get started with Max/MSP and YouTube videos that already show you how to make the mini-synth you're after (terrible as a programming environment but great as a learning/prototyping tool).

   The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads is a good companion here if you want inner workings. You might be able to snag a PDF copy online to see if it's for you.

   Audio Programming Book is entirely in C and can be a bit of a pain to get things working in C if you're new to programming (although highly worth the initial struggle if you're looking at it with a career in mind), although I'd still recommend stepping from Max/MSP into MATLAB/Python, which focuses on functionality rather than programming itself.

   Python is also bit more beginner friendly, although C++ will probably end up being your long term bet.

   I'd pick up the Pyo library for python, and/or a tutorial like this one, after dabbling with Max/MSP a bit: https://python.plainenglish.io/build-your-own-python-synthes...

   Then if you want to get even deeper into the DSP, you could go with pretty much any of the other resources the others have mentioned here. My personal faves are the Steven Smith DSP book, Julius Smith's resources (with its runnable MATLAB scripts), and DAFX book by Udo Zolzer.

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5. badosuMar 2018
   I've programmed my own simple synthesizer [1] by following along "The Audio Programming Book" [0].

   It gives a concise explanation for the techniques and theories for signal processing while showing practical code examples.

   [0]: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book

   [1]: https://github.com/badosu/sine_synth.lv2

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6. matt_daemonNov 2025
   I'm getting back in to audio programming, starting off with Pd[1] and reading Miller Puckette's book[2]. I'm planning on writing some low-level C libraries afterwards, using The Audio Programming Book[3] as a guide

   [1] https://puredata.info

   [2] https://msp.ucsd.edu/techniques.htm

   [3] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262014465/the-audio-programming...

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