I have to program in a very diverse set of environments:
1. Web stuff with Django using Eclipse
2. C/C++ using either Visual Studio 6, Visual Studio 2005 or GCC, with Windows being my target
3. Objective C for the iPhone (on Mac OSX)
4.  Arduino C for my Arduino board
This leads to three problems:
First of all, the systems [...]

There are several ways to play audio with using the iPhone SDK:
1. System Sound Services
2. Audio Queue Services
3. OpenAL
4. AVAudioPlayer
Before I finally settled on one, I went up a few wrong paths.  Let me give you some advice - if you want to play sounds in your none-game iPhone application, the best route to go [...]