LPC: The past, present, and future of Linux audio

For example, where is the audio data going? In _theory_ BeOS lets applications connect up any kind of graph. In practice, nearly all software asks for the system's default (software) mixer and feeds it 16-bit PCM.

Someone wrote a piece of software "Cortex" which exposes the graph, but if you actually install it and play around, first of all you'll crash a lot (Cortex and sometimes BeOS too) and secondly you'll start to find all the weird little bugs no-one encountered because they always hooked things up to the default mixer. So rather than exposing the graph in a way that users can play with it, like the various JACK graph tools, it behaves more as a debug tool for developers who know how to tread carefully.