Lack of a common API is a problem even inside OSs. Here's Windows: http://shanekirk.com/2015/10/a-brief-history-of-windows-audio-apis/ http://shanekirk.com/2015

Lack of a common API is a problem even inside OSs. Here's Windows: http://shanekirk.com/2015/10/a-brief-history-of-windows-audio-apis/ http://shanekirk.com/2015/10/a-brief-history-of-windows-audi... And I disagree that it's deadly simple... Even sound synthesis (where it's "just math") is very hard, because you have to watch out for aliasing. Same if you're changing pitch or doing anything other than playing back a WAV. Also, it's hard-realtime, which limits the programming languages you can use. Then, if you're not using the OS audio mixer (lots of different reasons not to), you gotta do the mixing yourself, which is another can of worms.