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A Quick Tour of the Core Audio SDK

You can build an audio unit from scratch using the Core Audio frameworks directly. However, as described throughout this document, Apple strongly encourages you to begin with the freely downloadable Core Audio software development kit, or SDK. Apple builds all of the audio units that ship in Mac OS X using the SDK.

The SDK offers many advantages to audio unit developers. The SDK:

• Insulates you from almost all the complexity in dealing with the Mac OS X Component Manager

• Greatly simplifies development effort with a rich C++ class hierarchy. In many cases, you can create audio units with a few method overrides. This lets you build full-featured, commercial quality audio units without directly calling any of the APIs in the Core Audio frameworks.

• Provides a straightforward starting point with Xcode audio unit project templates.

Contents:

Obtaining the Core Audio SDK
Navigating within the Core Audio SDK

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