Linux MIDI: a Brief History, Part 1 (Linux Journal) [LWN.net]

Linux MIDI: a Brief History, Part 1 (Linux Journal)

Posted Sep 13, 2004 17:53 UTC (Mon) by QuisUtDeus (guest, #14854)
Parent article: Linux MIDI: a Brief History, Part 1 (Linux Journal)

Sound (for me) has always been a mystery: How do you negotiate with a sound card? what kinds of info need to be sent and retrieved? how are the fancier cards (like 5.1) different? what about these USB sound devices? etc.

Is there a document on the basics of dealing with sounds-cards and what "sound" is (the developer's view)? Is there a sound program that illustrates the concepts well in its source?

This article looks like a good start for me to get some feeling for this (at least from a MIDI point-of-view), but I was wondering if there is more info.

Thanks in advance.

(Log in to post comments)

Linux MIDI: a Brief History, Part 1 (Linux Journal)

Posted Sep 13, 2004 18:51 UTC (Mon) by jre (guest, #2807) [Link]

I've found the best starting point for any research into Linux sound to be Dave Philips' excellent web site.
Trying to understand Linux sound architectures, I pursued some of the references given there, starting with the Jack and LADSPA links.
I quickly found myself out of my depth. Good luck!

pcm section of writing-an-alsa-driver

Posted Sep 13, 2004 18:59 UTC (Mon) by scottt (subscriber, #5028) [Link]

http://www.alsa-project.org/~iwai/writing-an-alsa-driver/...

The link above is a skeleton driver with PCM playback and recording function in the alsa-driver documentation.
For PCM hardware interfacing, a colleague told me the ALSA driver interface is much simpler than the OSS one. Though I have never written a full sound driver myself, the sample code does look very nice.

Perhaps others can post a link to a typical PCM hardware data sheet.