It is a cross-platform library, so programs using it can run on many different computer operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

PortAudio supports Core Audio, ALSA, and MME, DirectSound, ASIO and WASAPI on Windows.

Like other libraries whose primary goal is portability, PortAudio is written in the C programming language.

PortAudio is part of the PortMedia project, which aims to provide a set of platform-independent libraries for music software.

The free audio editor Audacity uses the PortAudio library,[2] and so does JACK on the Windows platform.