(This is the legacy documentation for SDL2, the previous stable version; SDL3 is the current stable version.)

SDL_GetDefaultAudioInfo

Get the name and preferred format of the default audio device.

Header File

Syntax

int SDL_GetDefaultAudioInfo(char **name,
                            SDL_AudioSpec *spec,
                            int iscapture);

Function Parameters

char **	name	A pointer to be filled with the name of the default device (can be NULL). Please call SDL_free() when you are done with this pointer!
SDL_AudioSpec *	spec	The SDL_AudioSpec to be initialized by this function.
int	iscapture	non-zero to query the default recording device, zero to query the default output device.

Return Value

(int) Returns 0 on success, nonzero on error.

Remarks

Some (but not all!) platforms have an isolated mechanism to get information about the "default" device. This can actually be a completely different device that's not in the list you get from SDL_GetAudioDeviceSpec(). It can even be a network address! (This is discussed in SDL_OpenAudioDevice().)

As a result, this call is not guaranteed to be performant, as it can query the sound server directly every time, unlike the other query functions. You should call this function sparingly!

spec will be filled with the sample rate, sample format, and channel count, if a default device exists on the system. If name is provided, will be filled with either a dynamically-allocated UTF-8 string or NULL.

Version

This function is available since SDL 2.24.0.