I haven't used SDL for audio in many years, but most games nowadays use FMOD or Wwise and not platform native audio API's and they work just as well with SDL (o

I haven't used SDL for audio in many years, but most games nowadays use FMOD or Wwise and not platform native audio API's and they work just as well with SDL (or GLFW or whatever) as without. Both FMOD and Wwise offer a free version[1]. Note also, in case you're not already aware, that SDL 2 is quite a different beast than SDL 1.x and is much improved in many ways, although I can't speak for addon libraries (I don't know what SDL media is like, for example). [1] The free version of Wwise has a limit of 500 sounds and your budget must be under $150K; while FMOD is free as long as your budget under $500k and you can only publish one game a year under this license -- either way, both are financially accessible to Indies and both are free during evaluation/development.