Hi there.

In the fall, I will be entering into a computer science university program with the hopes of eventually getting a job developing audio software.

Most of my concerns are about the career path side of things. While I know the whole one-man plugin developer thing is a possibility, I think I'm more interested in being an employee at a larger place. I guess my question is, what does that horizon look like?

Yeah, it's a vague question, but thanks.

I don't have a lot of information on this, but I do believe that there is a fair demand for audio programmers in the video game industry. That's where I'm headed -- or at least WANT to be heading. Initially I was interested in composition for video games, but that is a crowded field, and the more I got into looking at audio implementation the more I got fascinated with that side of it. As I spoke to more and more people about it, I acted on their advice to combine my degrees in music and computer science to pursue audio programming.

It makes sense, because as the audio systems in video games get larger and more complex, developers will need people dedicated to the audio side of programming. As for other careers paths in this area, I'm not too certain.

IMHO there are a few things to consider.

First of all, the game dev and audio dev industry is just horrible from a professional point of view. These aren't funny jobs and the compensation is ridiculous or just zero. About the demand, no there isn't. They simply use libraries for the audio stuff in their games. Much like their graphic engines.

Second, don't confuse programming, DSP development and the psychological aspects of audio processor design (oh and don't forget UX). These are totally different disciplines. And not the easiest ones. It takes a while to feel more or less comfortable in these areas, think in decades.

IMHO you can easily earn 4x the money with trivial corporate software development or web development. Do audio projects privately and maybe start by contributing to some established product. Communities like the one around Reaper or Renoise are very open for any kind of dev support. At least, that's what I recommend.

The industrial DSP market on the other hand is very active too (basically everything except audio). But in this case, you should better study physics or math from the beginning.

I second Fabien concerning game industry. Hardcore dsp programming jobs are centered around middleware developers and I don't think even they have many, at least Wwise (which our company uses) has some of it's effects lisenced from izotope.

As with the sound design related audio programming - it's more and more done within editors that resemble more or less scriptable modular samplers. No point to invent wheel again and with the price of middleware systems you couldn't hire a single audio programmer for more than month or couple of months.

Dunno, in my personal experience, video game audio coding is ok (money is fine, overtime is done by other ppl) but it doesn't really have that much DSP coding - it's much more comparable to a standard C++ library job (coding tools, making sure the whole thing doesn't blow up, file streaming, tinkering with ridiculous Iphone phonecall stuff thanks to Apple, etc). Probably totally depends on where you end up too.