How to play cross-platform audio from Haskell code

Question

I am writing a Haskell command-line application that runs on Linux, Windows, and OS X. Now I need to play the audio files ( .wav , .ogg and .mp3 ). How can I implement a function

 playAudioFile :: FilePath -> IO () 

or even better

 playAudio :: ByteString -> IO () 

which just works in the whole system?

(I am happy to invoke common command-line tools, and not to confuse them for distributing Windows.)

Answer 1

This is the code I came across using SDL-1.2:

 module PlaySound (withSound, playSound) where import Control.Monad import System.IO import System.Directory import Data.Foldable import Control.Exception import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy as B import Foreign.ForeignPtr import Graphics.UI.SDL as SDL import Graphics.UI.SDL.Mixer as Mix withSound :: IO a -> IO a withSound = bracket_ init cleanup where init = do SDL.init [SDL.InitAudio] getError >>= traverse_ putStrLn ok <- Mix.tryOpenAudio Mix.defaultFrequency Mix.AudioS16LSB 2 4096 unless ok $ putStrLn "Failed to open SDL audio device" cleanup = do Mix.closeAudio SDL.quit playSound :: B.ByteString -> IO () playSound content = do dir <- getTemporaryDirectory (tmp, h) <- openTempFile dir "sdl-input" B.hPutStr h content hClose h mus <- Mix.loadMUS tmp Mix.playMusic mus 1 wait -- This would double-free the Music, as it is also freed via a -- finalizer --Mix.freeMusic mus finalizeForeignPtr mus removeFile tmp wait :: IO () wait = do SDL.delay 50 stillPlaying <- Mix.playingMusic when stillPlaying wait 

The program at the end works fine, but

• Compiling SDL bindings on Windows is complicated. I followed this good explanation of how to do this.
• SDL bindings for SDL-1.2 seem unsupported or even not compiled with GHC-7.8 or later . At first I didn’t notice, because my distribution (Debian) fixes such problems, but this means that my users can no longer easily cabal install dependencies.
• there are bindings for SDL-2, but not for SDL_mixer, and I need it (I think).

So, I happily read the best answers.