What is libYSE?

What is libYSE?#

libYSE is a cross-platform C++ sound engine for live, experimental electronic music: patchers, live coding, instruments and MIDI in one signal graph, with spatial and physical controllers such as positions, swarms and physics moving the sounds. It plays audio files and procedural sources at any position in a 3D scene, mixes them through a hierarchical channel tree, and applies positioned reverb zones that the listener moves through.

What libYSE is#

  • A runtime sound engine. Load audio files (wav, ogg, flac), procedurally generate audio from custom DSP, or build modular Max/MSP-style graphs with the patcher.

  • 3D positional. Every sound has an (x, y, z) position; the listener has a position and an orientation. Distance attenuation, panning, and doppler are computed automatically.

  • Mixable. Channels group sounds for shared volume control and effects. Pre-built channels for music, ambient, voice, GUI, and SFX are available out of the box.

  • Embeddable. Build as a shared library and drop into a C++ application or game engine. Custom file IO callbacks (YSE::io) and in-memory buffer loading (YSE::BufferIO) let you read audio from a virtual file system or asset pack.

What libYSE is not#

  • Not a digital audio workstation. There is no timeline editor, no plug-in host, no automation lanes.

  • Not a game engine. libYSE is the audio layer of a larger application — you supply the rendering, physics, input handling, and game loop.

  • Not a music notation library. Notes and chords exist as MIDI-style values for the generative YSE::player, not as score symbols.

Supported platforms#

  • Windows (MSYS2 / Clang64, MSVC)

  • Linux (Clang or GCC, x64)

  • Android (NDK r27+, API 26+, arm64-v8a and x86_64 — built via Gradle in Tests/Android/; release archives published by CI)

The audio backends are PortAudio on desktop and Oboe (AAudio with OpenSL ES fallback) on Android. libsndfile decodes sample files everywhere. MIDI device I/O uses RtMidi on desktop and is gated behind the YSE_ENABLE_MIDI_DEVICE CMake option (on by default on Windows/Linux, off on Android).

A flat extern "C" ABI (yse_c/yse_*.h) is folded into the same shared library so language bindings (Dart FFI, Python ctypes, …) can call the engine without C++ ABI compatibility — enabled by default via YSE_BUILD_C_API=ON. C ABI (language bindings) starts with the rules a binding must follow.

Licence#

See LICENSE at the repository root.

Where next#