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Guide Through the Linux Sound API Jungle

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sat 27th Sep 2008 22:14 UTC, submitted by diegocg

Lennart Poettering, main programmer of the PulseAudio project, has written a 'Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle': "At the Audio MC at the Linux Plumbers Conference one thing became very clear: it is very difficult for programmers to figure out which audio API to use for which purpose and which API not to use when doing audio programming on Linux. So here's my try to guide you through this jungle."

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RE[3]: THIS ARTICLE IS A JOKE ...

by Detlef Niehof on Sun 28th Sep 2008 19:38 UTC in reply to "RE[2]: THIS ARTICLE IS A JOKE ..."

Member since:
2006-05-02

Totally agree. The Linux sound scape should be unified. Its really OSS's fault if you think about. They had a perfectly good sound api that Linux community was happy to use, but their licensing sucked, they didn't update it regularly enough and it was lacking features needed. So OSS4 comes out and Linux is supposed to drop ALSA because now OSS gets their head in the game?

Interesting. It's not that I know a whole lot about it, but from what I've been reading on the net it seems that the Linux developers went totally overboard when they dumped OSS entirely and started a complete rewrite of the sound system.
What was the problem that prevented forking the last free OSS version and continue development in parallel? Why was it necessary to create a Linux-only sound solution? Was it really necessary to deliberately fragment the Unix systems even more?
As noted before, I'm no expert in this, so any insightful comments about it are appreciated.

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