Sound Engines

As physics are handled by a physics engine, sounds can be handled comfortably by a sound engine. A low-level sound API such as DirectSound, PortAudio, OpenAL or EAX will only playback and record sound, possibly with 3D effects such as HRTF filtering or geometric occlusion. A sound engine typically also handles tasks such as audio file streaming, multi-language support (internationalization), cross-platform builds, complex sound events, and authoring. FMOD, Wwise, and XACT are examples for such systems. All three come with authoring applications and are free (FMOD and Wwise only for non-commercial use).

Code examples:

Basic use of FMOD
Controlling complex FMOD sound amalgams
Integrating FMOD with the Newton physics engine