Still a long way to go

Still a long way to go

Posted Aug 5, 2007 6:23 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: Still a long way to go by drag
Parent article: An Introduction to Linux Audio (O'Reilly)

> Alsa --- low level audio API

The problem with Alsa is that it is a bit confused about what level API it is supposed to be -- on the one hand there are the kernel drivers, which export a very low level interface to userspace, and then there is libasound. In practice, libasound is the only way to use the low level kernel drivers (IIRC they even get in trouble with the kernel developers because the kernel<->libasound interface is not even stable), and libasound adds all sorts of strange non-low-level stuff. It has plugins, you can route audio in weird directions, "dmix" actually uses sysv ipc to perform software mixing between multiple libasound users, etc. etc. All this in the lowest-level stable interface available.

My vague and uninformed impression is that alsa should back off to focus strictly on exposing the hardware, then pulseaudio and jack should provide the fancy stuff on top of that, and apps should target whichever is appropriate for the app in question. (Or pulseaudio and jack could hybridize to create the Ultimate User-Space Sound System, that'd be cool too.)

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