On Thu, 2004-01-29 at 13:59, Monique Y. Herman wrote: --snip-- > Since you seem to actually understand all this stuff ... > > How does alsa fit into all of this? If I have working sound drivers in > the kernel, should I care about alsa at all?
ALSA is a kernel-level driver for the sound device, replacing OSS. The basic chain of events for sound goes a little something like this: esd or artsd -> kernel level drivers (alsa or oss) -> sound card esd and artsd are technically optional. You can feed sound directly to either oss or alsa and have it work. I know that alsa can deal with multiple audio streams at once, but I don't believe that oss can, hence the need for things like esd or artsd. I would suggest that if your soundcard is supported by ALSA, to use it. I've had much better results with ALSA than I have with OSS on all of my machines. It's a little bit more work to set it up, but well worth it. Coincidentally, as the discussion was originally about esd and the such, I thought I'd share a few fun quotes from Alan Cox regarding esd: "esound is junk. The only thing esd has is a good client API for going boing at approximately the right time. Anything else is beyond it." "I don't know why and I'm not yet motivated to fix it since my views on esd are mostly unprintable." -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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