tuxradar's map of linux audio

[Roderick Colenbrander]

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Ben Klein <shacklein at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 9 April 2010 20:30, Damjan Jovanovic <damjan.jov at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 12:04 PM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:
>>> This seemed like a useful overview of how the various layers relate to
>>> each other:
>>> http://tuxradar.com/content/how-it-works-linux-audio-explained
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> http://insanecoding.blogspot.com/2009/06/state-of-sound-in-linux-not-so-sorry.html
>> is another good one.
>
> The diagrams there are generally much more representative of the
> reality of audio APIs in Linux systems. A few gems:
> "As should be obvious, these sound servers today do nothing except add
> latency, and should be done away with."
> "Compare the insanity that is PulseAudio ..."
>
> :)
>
>

Whether we like it our not audio servers are the future, they make
things a lot easier for users they don't care about the card but only
see a microphone, speakers and other input/output devices and don't
know how it is wired up. The audio server (or whatever thing you use
as a 'router') all takes care of it.

Windows Vista/Win7 also use a sound server quite similar to
pulseaudio. In Wine, Maarten is busy implementing these new Windows
APIs and older winmm (and perhaps dsound) will be layered on top of it
which is also what Windows does. The design will use OpenAL and
whether that's a good choice is another discussion.

Roderick