The audio engine of cocos, in my view, is not a good one. It has four implementation for different platforms and they are platform dependent. It‘s not flexible and dose not support effects. More seriously, there are many unfixed old issues related to it.
Now cocos is updating to v4, I think it’s time to change. Just as develpoers suggested in this issue and this issue, use only one implementation based on OpenAL is very necessary.
LÖVE is a good example for this. Its audio engine is simple and clear, with only one OpenAL implementation. It also supports effects, filters and recording. I can simply use its codes in my project and get rid of limitations and issues of cocos.
V4 is the future version, I think we should make the audio engine a better one.