SDL_mixer is a sample multi-channel audio mixer library. It supports any number of simultaneously playing channels of 16 bit stereo audio, plus a single channel of music, in FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, MP3, MOD, and MIDI formats. As of SDL_mixer 1.2.7, FLAC, MOD, Ogg Vorbis and MP3 loading libraries are dynamically loaded, so if you don't need to load those formats, you don't need to include those shared libraries.