This is pretty much what I was looking for, thanks for the tip. It has very high level api calls but unfortunately, the MCI library seems limited as for how much I can configure the soundcard I'm recording from (audio is recorded too low with too much noise), so I guess I have to keep looking for a more robust customizable audio library API. I found that audacity uses the portaudio api, but the perl module to access that is too low level for me at this point.