ALSA
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ALSA (an acronym for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is a Linux kernel module that replaces several different kernel drivers for sound cards with a single device driver which handles the diversity of sound cards internally. Some of the goals of the ALSA project were to support automatic configuration of sound card hardware, and graceful handling of multiple sound devices in a system, goals which it has largely met. A couple of different frameworks such as JACK use ALSA to provide the ability to perform low latency professional grade audio editing and mixing.
Led by Jaroslav Kysela, the project started from a Linux driver for the Gravis Ultrasound in 1998, and was developed separately from the Linux kernel until it was introduced in the 2.5 development series in 2002 (2.5.4-2.5.5)1 (http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.5/ChangeLog-2.5.5). In the 2.6 version it obsoletes OSS by default. ALSA provides 100% backward compatibility to OSS while adding automatic multiplex sound streams, meaning you can play many sound streams at the same time without a sound server such as EsounD (GNOME) and aRts (KDE). ALSA also requires its own sound drivers for sound cards, as the old OSS drivers are now also obsolete.
See also
External links
- http://www.alsa-project.org/
- http://alsa.opensrc.org/ (a big ALSA Wiki)
- Alsa and Debian (http://wiki.debian.net/?ALSA).
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