What is dart-yse?

What is dart-yse?#

dart-yse is the Dart binding for libYSE, a cross-platform C++ sound engine for games and interactive applications. The wrapper sits on top of the engine’s flat extern "C" ABI (yse_c/yse_*.h) and exposes every C++ subsystem through idiomatic Dart classes — Sound, Channel, Reverb, Patcher, Player, MidiOut, …

What dart-yse is#

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

  • 3D positional. Every Sound carries a Pos; the Listener carries position and orientation. Distance attenuation, panning, and doppler are computed automatically by the engine.

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

  • Embeddable. Pure Dart FFI — no Flutter dependency. Runs on desktop, server-side Dart, and Flutter (Android included: the package’s build hook bundles the engine).

What dart-yse is not#

  • Not a Flutter widget library. There is no audio-player widget; the package is the engine, not the UI.

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

  • Not a stand-alone implementation. Every call ultimately runs through the upstream C++ engine — the Dart layer is a thin handle / lifetime / type-safety wrapper.

Supported platforms#

  • Windows (x64; prebuilt engine, or built from source with MSYS2 Clang64)

  • Linux (x64; prebuilt engine, or built from source with Clang or GCC; tested on Ubuntu 24.04)

  • Android (API 26+, arm64-v8a and x86_64; prebuilt engine bundled by the package’s build hook, or built from source with NDK 27)

The audio backends are PortAudio on desktop and Oboe (AAudio with OpenSL ES fallback) on Android — chosen by the engine, not the wrapper. MIDI device I/O uses RtMidi on Windows and Linux; Android has no MIDI device support.

Pre-release status#

dart-yse is at v0.x; 0.2.0 binds libYSE v3.1.0. Moving from 0.1.0 (libYSE 2.4) is a breaking upgrade: see Upgrading to package:yse 0.2.0 (libYSE 3.1). The full C++ API is wrapped except for one upstream-deferred area:

  • Custom DSP-source subclassing and the callback-based YSE::io VFS are deferred to a later release. BufferIO covers the common asset-pack use case in the meantime.

Where next#