WARNING: This is a development post. So if you're not into programming, you might find it pretty boring...
 
Over the last weeks, I tried to find a good library for sound output. The library should be able to do the following:

• compile on all relevant platforms without to much hassle
• play background music from compressed files
• play sounds triggered by input events without notable lag (for jump sounds, etc.)

First, I looked at Phonon, which is a multimedia API that is part of Qt. But -- apart from being not quite finished and still somewhat buggy -- it's an API for playing multimedia content. That does exclude playing sounds in real time, which is of course something we need.
 
Then I gave SDL a try. On Linux it works very well. But I found compiling SDL on Windows XP rather painful, and I didn't manage to get it compiled with the DirectSound backend, which seems to be necessary to get a low latency for triggered sounds. (I think the backend that was used, is called "waveout", and always has a latency of at least 250ms).
 
At that point, I was not sure, if a nice and easy solution could be found at all... till i tried out SFML. It's meant to be a modern replacement for SDL. It's written in C++ (but has complete C-Bindings) and the project looks very alive. As usual, triggered sounds on Windows XP were being played with a lag. But the people at the SFML forums were quite helpful and suggested using the svn version. That version works fine both on Linux and Windows XP. So, after a long and painful search, Joyride Laboratories proudly presents the sound library, that we will most probably use:
 
SMFL 2.0
 
That is, if it also works nicely on Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Mac OS X.