Introduction to Linux Sound Systems and APIs

UnderScan writes "Linux.com is running an article on Linux kernel sound subsystems, OSS & ALSA, and their APIs. Insightful commentary from both users and the project's developers can be found at OSNews.com comments section."

Comments

I don't think it's as bad as you make it out to be

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Ever used a system with multiple sound cards? I have, and I'm not even an audio engineer. That approach wouldn't work very well for it.

You want to "dump a file to /dev/audio"? What format would be used? Linear or logarithmic encoding? What if the sound card does MP3 decompression onboard -- how do you get MP3 data to it? How do you detect whether to use 44.1 or 48kHz? Am I unable to set bass enhancement from the command line? What if I want to play a MIDI? What about cards that have a front and rear stereo channel -- where does what go?

I'm not saying that these are insoluable, just that there's a bit more complexity than you're making out.

How would you implement "mixing should be handled intelligently"? This is something that I've thought and bitched about for a while. The ideal would be to automatically use hardware mixing up to the maximum number of channels (two on an old card I had, 32 on my current Sound Blaster Live), then fall back to software mixing. The problem is that you have to have some buffer space to mix audio, which means adding latency. When you hit 33 channels and that last channel has to be software-mixed, what are you going to do -- suddenly bump up the latency in the audio to add a buffer into the audio output line? Right in the middle of playback?