Difference between revisions of "ALSA"
From Hydrogenaudio Knowledgebase
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m (→ALSA over OSS) |
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* Support for the older OSS API. | * Support for the older OSS API. | ||
==ALSA over OSS== | ==ALSA over OSS== | ||
| + | There are many advantages ALSA has over the older OSS API: | ||
| + | |||
| + | * kernel-space supports only hardware-level capabilities | ||
| + | * multi-thread safe design | ||
| + | * transparent use of plugin architecture to handle format,rate,channel cnt and many other conversions | ||
| + | * support for non-interleaved interfaces | ||
| + | * user-space software mixing ''(dmix)'' | ||
| + | * user-space "loopback/snoop" capabilities | ||
| + | * merging multiple cards into a single virtual device | ||
| + | * hiding non-ALSA-drivers behind a consistent user-space API (e.g. IEEE1394 drivers, or JACK) | ||
| + | * consistent and generic control API for managing hardware controls | ||
| + | * Flexible mixer architecture to handle modern audio interfaces fully (rather than reducing them to a simplistic device) | ||
| + | * consistent support for multiple instances of the same card | ||
| + | * linked operations of multiple cards | ||
| + | * and more... | ||
=Development API= | =Development API= | ||
Revision as of 19:51, 18 August 2006
Contents
Introduction
ALSA or Advanced Linux Sound Architectureis a project, which seeks to provide MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system. ALSA has the following significant features.
Features
- Effcient support for all soundcards from consumer to professional multichannel audio devices
- Fully modularized sound drivers
- SMP and thread-safe design
- alsa-lib in order to simplify the high level API
- Support for the older OSS API.
ALSA over OSS
There are many advantages ALSA has over the older OSS API:
- kernel-space supports only hardware-level capabilities
- multi-thread safe design
- transparent use of plugin architecture to handle format,rate,channel cnt and many other conversions
- support for non-interleaved interfaces
- user-space software mixing (dmix)
- user-space "loopback/snoop" capabilities
- merging multiple cards into a single virtual device
- hiding non-ALSA-drivers behind a consistent user-space API (e.g. IEEE1394 drivers, or JACK)
- consistent and generic control API for managing hardware controls
- Flexible mixer architecture to handle modern audio interfaces fully (rather than reducing them to a simplistic device)
- consistent support for multiple instances of the same card
- linked operations of multiple cards
- and more...
