Right now I have just started working with audio and sound. I have been working with the SDL_Mixer tutorials, and so far, I seem to understand whats going on with that. My question is: is there any point to learning the raw SDL audio components?

The correct answer is "No".

To be sure, there are times when one might like to mix one's own audio. Maybe you're into that sort of thing. Probably, you're not. Likely, you just want to play WAV files, and if so, you probably want to play more than one simultaneously. Do you want to write your own WAV loader? Do you want to write a conversion utility that takes a WAV file in it's original format and put it into the format that the primary sound buffer is in? Do you want to have to merge the various inputs together to make things sound correct?

The only "good" part of SDL's audio is the CDROM component, which is technically almost a different component, and kind of useless unless you are making a product that ships on CD or you have a desire to make a CD player application.

Ah. Thankyou for thouroughly answering my question! This is mostly for the sake of writing my API tutorials, as I havn't worked on a game in like, a year.

All I wanted was simple audio, thanks.