What's a simple way to output homebrewed synthesized sound on Unix?

I want to do some sound sy开发者_如何转开发nthesis on Mac OS X (and ideally other Unix-like OS) using ANSI C.

This is for learning purposes rather than "I need a solution, any solution, quick!"

Say I have an 8-bit buffer in my C program that I update 22050 times a second. How can I get my speakers to output that as a waveform?

SDL can play sound buffers. But PortAudio may work better PA will call your C callback when it needs more data, and then you can hand it the next buffer. It's fairly easy actually.

There is no POSIX audio API or something similar. So if you want sound support on Linux, OSX, etc. you need a library that wraps around the native sound APIs of the different OSs. Take a look on this SO question. It's not asking directly for OSX, but most of the answers should also work for it, except maybe libao. At least I haven't found anything on their homepage, that says they support OSX.