ALSA (Linux)
Encyclopedia : A : AL : ALS : ALSA (Linux)
ALSA (an acronym for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) is a Linux kernel component intended to replace the original Open Sound System (OSS) for providing drivers for sound cards. Some of the goals of the ALSA project at its inception were 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 allow performing low-latency professional-grade audio editing and mixing.
Led by Jaroslav Kysela, the project started from a Linux driver for the Gravis Ultrasound sound card 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]. In the 2.6 version it replaces OSS by default.
ALSA features
ALSA was designed to to use some features which were not, at the time of its conception, supported by OSS:
- Hardware based MIDI synthesis
- Hardware mixing of multiple channels
- Full-duplex operation
- Multiprocessor-friendly, thread-safe drivers
Besides the sound device drivers, ALSA bundles a user space library for application developers who want to use driver features with a higher level API than direct interaction with the kernel drivers.
See also
- redirect
External links
- [Official site]
- http://alsa.opensrc.org/ (a big ALSA Wiki)
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.