Introduction

Macs are great media computers, and the iPhone is the best iPod ever made—but how did they get that way? How did some of the first iOS applications turn the iPhone into a virtual instrument, yet developers on other mobile platforms remain happy enough to just to reskin another simple MP3 player? Why is the Mac the choice of so many digital media professionals, and what secret makes applications such as Bias Peak, Logic, and Soundtrack Pro possible?

Core Audio, that’s what.

Core Audio is the low-level API that Apple provides for working with digital audio on Mac OS X and iOS. It provides APIs for simultaneously processing many streams of multichannel digital audio and interfaces to the audio hardware for capture (microphones) and ...

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