The Sound Manager is the part of the Mac OS that controls the production and manipulation of sounds on Macintosh computers. You can use the Sound Manager to create a wide variety of sounds and to manipulate sounds in many ways. The Sound Manager is also used by other parts of the Mac OS that produce sounds, such as the Speech Manager and QuickTime.
You can use the Sound Manager to create and manage sound channels; obtain information about available sound features and sound channels; play notes and other sounds at various frequencies and volumes; play one or more sounds asynchronously; parse sound resources; compress and expand sound data; and use double buffers to bypass the normal play-from-disk routines.