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Hey there, so I'm on the same journey as you are and trying to find a pathway to learning this stuff seems really difficult. First of all there is an audio programming discord server you should be a part of. I'll send you a pm with an invite.

Second, there seems to be two branches to game audio programming: DSP programming and engine programming. The DSP stuff is easy to find resources for as it is a more general audio programming discipline. Not just for games. And the JUCE framework is a great place to get started. This guy has a course that you can take days 1-7 for free and he has a good way of showing and explaining things and giving exercises and a slack channel. The guy who runs the audio programming discord server also has a youtube channel with an in depth series for JUCE.

Sooo... for the engine programming stuff. Really good tuts or resources are hard to come by. I'm still looking for a good guide. The book you mentioned: "Getting Started with C++ Audio Programming for Game Development" Seems to be a good resource and it was the next book I wanted to get! buuuuut.. What you said about the API not being available anymore is worrisome. The next book on my list is Game Audio Programming 2. But I hear this is more of a good practice and tips and tricks book than a how to manual. The author of the book, Guy Somberg, Gives a presentation that lays out the basics. And so its kind of like learn how to do that stuff? that's the stuff you need to know, but good luck trying to find some resource that walks you through it. My path was going to be to find a basic game engine like the OlcPixelEngine from One Lone Coder and then try and do with that engine what Guy Somberg lays out in the presentation.

Good luck! If you find any awesome resources please pass it along!

What genre do you generally work around, and what extra goodies do you need/want?

$200 is a fine budget for a keyboard, but you need to make sure you get what you need.

If you're doing anything significantly electronic, 25-key with an octave shift is absolutely fine. However, if you're into more orchestral stuff, you'll find 25-key (and thus, effectively single-handed play) keyboards are limiting.

Knobs are good for synth and effect editing as well as automation recording (if you're willing to sit through all the mapping... ugh), and drum pads (while generally terrible on these things) are nice for some quick-n-dirty rhythm recording.
If you like this stuff, then the keyboard you're looking at is fantastic.

However, pitch-bend and mod-wheels are really important if you're going for a groovy soundtrack style (think Starcraft), and that's sadly an area that gets cut on the real-low-end.
If you like bendy, groovy stuff, this one might be good for you:
http://www.amazon.com/M-Audio-Oxygen-49-Keyboard-Controller/dp/B0031SCV46

And on a final note: Don't go for the Arturia MiniLab. Poor build quality + touchstrips is not something I can recommend.

(Sources: EDM/Multi-genre producer. Owned the previous version of the keyboard you're talking about, as well as a similar Arturia keyboard)

Hey. I can offer some advice as far headphones go. I have had a lot of experience with the Sennheiser HD 280 pros (http://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-280-Pro-Headphones/dp/B000065BPB) . They are recommended for the course I am taking and I personally love them. For under a $100 you can get something that blows Beats out of the water, and will definitely be a step up from skullcandys. I've done a lot of mixing with them and they performed very well when I was doing 5.1.
Feel free to PM if you got any questions.
Have a great day.

The book Designing Sound is good overview/tutorial of sound synthesis techniques. It uses Pure Data for its examples. Pure Data is easy to learn so it might be a good option to get started with sound synthesis. Later on you might want to experiment with more powerful tools such as Csound.

Hey OP, not sure exactly which one you are referring to but it might be one of these:

Looking to start a career in composing music for games, just got some questions about where I'm coming from

Colleague of mine is making a living out of composing for more than 5 years. A blog interviewed him. Thought this might be an inspiration for all of you aspiring musicians and game composers.

I have the portfolio, I have the skills, I have some paid experience, where do I go from here?

Perhaps these will help, but a lot of materials are out there for looking at getting jobs in the game industry including

A Composer's Guide to Game Music and Make Some Noise! Getting a Job Creating Sound and Music for Videogames.

I recently went through The Essential Guide to Game Audio. It's also more of a broad look into game audio, but it's a great starting guide thats very much up to date, and even comes with an iOS app that pairs with it. The chapters on Unity are also very helpful.

I think a links in the sidebar for useful literature should be included as well. A book that I just bought that comes highly recommended is The Sound Effects Bible.

The book, The Complete Guide to Game Audio (For Composers, Musicians, Sound Designers, and Game Developers) includes a sample

• non-disclosure agreement
  
• talent release (performers paid by you to use their performance as your "work")
  
• work-for-hire agreement
  
• audio development agreement (based on Tommy Tallarico's standard contract), and
  
• professional services agreement (basically a generic agreement you could expect to receive from a larger studio).
  
  I think the DVD that comes with the book includes PDFs of these contracts, but I'm not sure, as mine is lost in the stacks somewhere.

if you're thinking about audio programming for games this is a great book to get started with basic audio programming concepts.

As far as book recommendations, check out anything by Julius O Smith (his website has all his books for free), A Digital Signal Processing Primer by Ken Steiglitz, The Audio Programming Book by Richard Boulanger & Victor Lazzarini, and this one has been on my wishlist for a while.

The program is very young (under a decade), so I can't give too many examples (our first graduate did land a producer's job at Microsoft, and our second is in R&D upstairs, working on the sound engine for our in-house game engine), but generally these skills translate to other areas of software development that involve heavy DSP knowledge (biomedical tech, watermarking, speech recognition, communications tech).

I should mention DigiPen provides a hyper-focused course of study. It's definitely not a good choice if you're looking for a general education, or even a generalized CS education. Most of what we learn is Assembly/C/C++ in Procedural/Object-Oriented styles. On the upside though, there's a projects course every single term, which is where most of your portfolio comes from.

If you're looking for books, I just released this: https://www.amazon.com/Game-Audio-Unity-Ciarán-Robinson/dp/1138315974 - it goes though making your own FPS game, along with creating the sound effects and music

I am in the same situation kinda. Unfortunately there's little hands on documentation out there beside the official docs which you'll find in the "FMOD Studio Programmers API" at http://www.fmod.org/download/. Also there's [this book] (http://www.amazon.de/Getting-Started-Audio-Programming-Development/dp/1849699097) that might help.

Could you use a cable or plug to combine the incoming sound to mono?

https://www.amazon.com/C2G-Cables-40634-Adapter-Metallic/dp/B000O7AW98

Depending on your math skills either: The Computer Music Tutorial by Curtis Roads, or Computer Music by Charles Dodge.



They both cover just about everything, with Dodge being the more technical of the two.

I also use UE4 and I just finished the book Game Audio Implementation which I learned a lot from.

Ahh. You're probably gonna get more out of orchestration tutorials for protools. I don't really care for the way that it implements midi but I would suggest starting there. That's really going to get you going in the right direction.
also for orchestration check out .

http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Orchestration-Dover-Books-Music/dp/0486212661/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377044899&sr=1-1&keywords=rimsky+korsakov+principles+of+orchestration

If neither DT-770 nor the M50 is isolating enough, there is another level up in terms of isolation for headphones. Extreme isolation headphones are more literally a combo of headphones and firing-range earmuffs. They are typically designed as hearing protection for stuff like drumming and working near jet engines, so not necessarily guaranteed to be as accurate as studio headphones, but there are many decent quality ones out there.

[Alesis VI25 Advanced 25-Key USB MIDI Pad/Keyboard Controller] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IWVL3SW/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_6GEnub0MBA9ZJ)

Or if you can go slightly over $200-

[Alesis VI49 Advanced 49-Key USB MIDI Pad/Keyboard Controller] (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00IWVWUWA/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_TIEnub1KMDMZT)

I've had the alesis q49 for about 2 years, now with not one single issue. And it's been through some hell.

I had the original mpk mini, and the USB port stopped working within a year, and it never left my desk.