[Haskell-beginners] Audio packages.

[Sourabh]

Hello, I'm a Haskell beginner and am working on my first *serious* haskell
project. After going through a few books, and working on the exercises in
the books, I finally started writing a small 2D game in Haskell. I figured
this would give me lots of exposure to Haskell, and also on how graphics,
keyboard, sound, etc are done.

Also, I'm working on windows, so unfortunately building the correct
libraries has been a bit of a pain. In fact, my question pertains to this.

I am currently at the stage where I can get various events to happen
correctly in the game, but there is no sound. I started looking at various
audio related packages earlier today, but I can't seem to find any
documentation on any packages. To add to my woes, I just can't, for the
life of me, get any packages to install correctly on windows. So far I have
tried OpenAL, SDL-mixer, PortAudio on windows, and none of them seem to
work.

Cabal install outright fails and asks me to go the MinGW/msys route. When I
try to go through this route (which worked successfully for me for
graphics), I still can't get any libraries to build. The various errors I
have encountered range from configure/build failing, to dependencies not
installing correctly. Looking at the various hits on google, it seems that
I am not alone in this.

I finally managed to get SDL to install (but not SDL-mixer). Even though
SDL has an Audio component to it, the lack of documentation on the API has
left me with no way to figure out how to actually use this...?
Link that worked for me:
http://www.animal-machine.com/blog/2010/04/a-haskell-adventure-in-windows/
Finally, I have started getting this error every time I do a cabal install
now:
Setup.hs:1:8:
    Could not find module `Distribution.Simple':
      Use -v to see a list of the files searched for.

Have I finally done something terrific and blown everything apart?

Sadly, instead of spending time writing Haskell code, I find myself
spending a lot of time getting libraries to install and work on Windows. Is
this common, or am I doing something wrong?

At this point I would very much like advice on a couple of things:
1. Does anyone know any good Audio packages, that would work on windows,
along with some examples and documentation of the API?
2. What should I do to get cabal to start installing stuff again?
I apologize if I sound a bit frustrated, because I guess I am. :)
Thanks for any advice, and have a happy new year!
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