What is libYSE?

What is libYSE?#

libYSE is a cross-platform C++ sound engine for games and interactive applications. 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 naturally.

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.

Licence#

See LICENSE at the repository root.

Where next#