Learning Core Audio: A Hands-on Guide to Audio Programming for Mac and iOS [Paperback]

First let's start with stating how satisfied I am of having found that this book exists. Core audio is one of the most difficult programming topic I ever found, because of the subject matter and because of arcane, not very well documented, obscure and often inconsistent Api conventions and naming. OpenGl is difficult as it requires loads of mathematics, but is wery well documented. Core Audio is as difficult as OpenGL, mayebe more, but knowledge about it is much harder to be found.

The authors take their time to tell their readers what this book is not, it is not a book for wannabe programmers, it is not a beginners guide, beginners and less than determined programmers, please look elswhere. Audio is not for everybody, it involves doing computations in real time and is an order of magnitude more difficult than say, Ruby web based design.

A prerequisite for a beginner's book on Audio on Mac OsX and iOS, is being a rather advanced programmer in all three major languages required by the platform: Objective C, C (on which Core audio is based) and C++ (because of OpenAl 3d audio). You should be proficient enough to be familiar with structs, pointers and memory allocation.
The approach of the authors is keeping the UI side to a bare minimum, as UI is not what this book is all about: on the Mac side this choice implies having to deal with command line programs, and ignoring the Cocoa side of things. As this book is centered on Audio programming this choice is very logical. On the iOS chapter, a barebone simple View controller is used (as iOS does not support CLI.).
Learning Core Audio explains how to use all the major audio engines available on Apple platforms, which are basic Core Audio services, Core audio queues, Audio units and Open Al.
Differences between the iOS and Mac approach is detailed in the 10th chapter, after the Mac platform has been explained.
What you won't find in this book: this is not a complete treatment of the matter, which would have been simply impossible, but is rather gentle (as gentle as possible, not too much) introduction to as much as possible of the main aspects of the matter. The authors do attempt to let the reader acquire a full view on the general phylosophy, unwritten conventions and way of thinking necessary in order to deal with the frameworks, enabling the reader to go on and research further on his or her own after reading this book. The authors do manage to render Core audio understandable and practically approachable by determined and cabable programmers, and out of the restricted circle of über-Hackers and programming demi-gods. At least a book on Core Audio for us normal humans, the authors seem to discourage casual potential readers by stating how difficult Core Audio is, well I do believe the subject is difficult, but they did an excellent job in making it practically understandable.

How to build a complete commercial Audio Unit is not dealt with, nor is in any way treated the required knowledge of electronic music principles and digital signal processing. These subjects require separate reading of the typical well known and usually large tomes on the subject (e.g. Boulanger, Openheim-Shafer).

I cannot but recommend this book as required reading on the matter of Core Audio programming.
Personally I would have liked to see at least an introductory chapter on DSP and some coverage of Audio Unit development, but these subjects were obviously either too complex or not completely related to Core Audio learning, for which this book is THE starting point.
I am also very grateful to the publisher, for the courage shown in publishing a book which will not be of interest for a very large audience, but which was nonetheless desperately needed.

Prior to this book being released coding anything with core audio was a mess, even with the apple docs. This book actually provides sequential steps for how to create useful audio tools such as file players (not as trivial as people think it is...), effect units, and spacial sound. I wish it covered more on streaming audio from URLs (Audio File Stream --> Audio Queues), but I guess it takes the academic route of "leaving that as an exercise for the reader."

Either way, this book is awesome and one of a kind. Like audio much? Buy it!

The publisher contacted me as a software engineer in the Macintosh and iOS space and asked me to review this book. I was happy to do so since not many of the applications I have worked on had any significant need for sound so Core Audio is not an area of the operating systems I had previously explored. After reading the book, I am glad that I have not had to "go it alone." Sound, and sound encoding are complex subjects and this book is not shy about pointing that out. However, the text and code examples do a good job of putting a handle on that complexity so you can get your hands on it.

This is certainly a book for people who are already familiar with Macintosh or iPhone programming and who are looking for targeted information about Core Audio. If you are new to Xcode, Objective-C, or the Application Frameworks then this is not the best book to begin with. I appreciated this quite a lot, so many books feel the need to explain how to set up new projects, or new application targets.

Following an excellent introduction to the fundamental concepts of sound, and how it is encoded and stored on computers, the book proceeds with a series of modules dedicated to exploring Core Audio in all its wonderful complexity. I was particularly fascinated by one of the early chapters which described how to generate sound files with pitches of fixed frequencies. I combined this with an interest in music theory to create files containing chords. Admittedly this is not something for everyone, but it was fun.

The book also covers recording sound from external sources. This was another fun chapter, particularly when my kids found out what I was working on. I had been making simple recordings of myself saying "One, Two, Three" but once the kids got involved I had plenty of help making samples.

Another chapter I had a lot of fun with was the chapter on positional sound and OpenAL. There's nothing like setting up a simple sound source then making it orbit, virtually, around you. It was wholly entertaining.

As I mentioned, I've not had much call for audio programming at the level of the Core Audio frameworks, but this book gave me some ideas of how sound might play a role nonetheless. If you are interested in Audio on the Macintosh or iOS devices then this book would be a great place to start. It is certainly a complex subject, with equally complex frameworks, but this book is a great way to make