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While trying to get my sound to work, I was wondering about the roles of ALSA and PulseAudio. I have both installed and was wondering, for example, which of them needs to know about my sound card. Both seem to be able to use each other, there's a pulseaudio plugin for ALSA, and on my system, alsa shows up as a sound card in pulseaudio. Which of the two does what, are they alternatives or complementary? |
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ALSA is the kernel level sound mixer, it manages your sound card directly. ALSA is a crap (seriously) and it can handle a few (sometimes just one) channel. PulseAudio is a software mixer, on top of the userland (like you'd run an app). When it runs, it uses Alsa's channel and manages EVERY mixing stuff, devices, network devices, everything by itself. (It's like one more unneeded layer) Actually you can run only ALSA, but you might get mixing problems and Ubuntu comes with PA support/PA dependence. (Some apps are hard coded to use PulseAudio, with custom patches and so on.) (PulseAudio also consumes much more CPU than OSS or ALSA.) Whats the point? People say for networking it is good, and it solves the multi-channel misery, easy to develop apps for PA, easy to select new devices, to control volume by app, etc etc. However, in my opinion there is no point in PulseAudio. Okay, networking is OK. But for a simple user, its just an insane fat stuff on the system. It adds latency, it runs NOT in the kernel (Okay I won't list all the problems with it). They should write an ALSA2 (Pick out the solutions from PA and add the essential ones into Alsa). OSS solves the problem, however its not GPL, they don't like it. (The open source ...uhm... 'leaders'..) That's why they say (game developers, app developers) that they hate writing apps for Linux because the whole sound system is a messy hell. Illustration: |
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