Questions about extra Sound and Graphics libraries
 

I am just curious... Lets say that I want to make a console application that will manipulate images or sound (doesn't make any difference in my question). An example of image manipulation is to convert an image from CMYK to RGB color or stretch it. An example of sound manipulation is to make conversions between formats (aiff, mp3, aac), or de-noise the sound.

Either way, I imagine that there are graphics and sound libraries that handle these kinds of manipulations. I know there are 2 libraries that may do these things (OpenAL and OpenGL) but are those enough?

Could you point me into the right direction (if I'm not already there)? Also, could you provide me with links to such libraries (and tutorials)? (preferably cross-platform, as I am on OS X and I don't intend to go to the windows world for a while..)

Well yeah, fmod for sound, OpenGL/DirectX for graphics. There are lots of engines around, try searching the forums or google for other ones, just use searchterms like 'graphics engine', 'sound library' etc.

OpenGL and DirectX is used for drawing graphics to the screen and is not suitable for manipulating images. I would recomend ImageMagick: www.imagemagick.org. It will create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a large variety of formats. Images can be cropped, colors can be changed, various effects can be applied, images can be rotated and combined, and text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves can be added to images and stretched and rotated. It support more than 95 image formats.

You may do these operations via command line tools or use libraries for the following languages: C, Ch, C++, Java, Lisp, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl/Tk. It also has ready made interfaces. It's free, open source and runs on all major operating systems.

I dont know about sound manipulaiton/conversion, but I dont think OpenAL is the answer.