Stojke wrote:Depends on what do you want to do and with what.
I think what would mostly be interesting is an example of a certain chip and some background info on sound programming from somebody who tried quite a bit of this.
There are a lot of different types of chips and different types of sound generation.
Agreed. I'm not entirely clear on what you intend to do here - on one hand I'm remembering my Apple II and a few programs that friends had made that would get it to "play" various little musical clips (like the Star Wars or Star Trek themes) as a series of beeps from the system speaker. Those weren't terribly complicated to put together, just very very tedious (and could be turned into very annoying programs if they were locked into an infinite loop).
On the other hand, I'm thinking you may be wanting to address something like a modern audio DSP (like a Creative Labs Audigy for the sake of example), but it sounds like you want to create music or sound effects - not write your own driver (which is really all addressing the chip "directly" would do - also keep in mind that writing third-party drivers can be a legal gray area, because it may or may not involve reverse engineering the OEM drivers (which usually violates their EULA)). In general you don't need direct hardware access to create music or sound effects - just an audio editing program (or suite of programs) and the time and willingness to learn and experiment until you get what you want. Something like FL Studio or Acid would let you do quite a lot of "making music" without a lot of external controllers or instruments (it won't sound exactly like if you were recording an acoustic instrument though). Alternately, like bristlehog suggested, you may find what you want going towards a sound library.
Controlling amplitude is easily handled through the device's drivers, I'm not sure what you mean by "frequency and other low level stuff" though.