Linux Audio : Welcome to the spaghetti system

Saturday, April 18. 2009

Linux Audio : Welcome to the spaghetti system

Diagram of Linux Audio

Ever wondered why PulseAudio sucks so bad?

Sick of the multiple Audio stacks in Linux? (OSS/ALSA/PulseAudio).
Ever wanted to make sense of items like JACK,ESD,aRts and NAS or just confused with either GStreamer or xine?

Here is a clever overview of the sound systems that is Linux. (click the image for a larger view)/

Linux audio like it or not is a mess. Multiple layers providing the same functionality. It's a house of cards that often falls down.
Things have been hidden well in OSS/ALSA and it's not until demanding audio like HD codecs have started to make their way across that some of these issues are starting to be uncovered (the infamous 'popping' sounds).

PulseAudio has been poking and pushing ALSA in recent times, and as a result unearthed a number of issues.

I'm hopefully eventually we'll get to a single, simple but powerful audio stack. I'm not holding my breath though.

Posted by Matt in Apps, Coding, Hardware, Linux, Opinion at 03:13 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: alsa, apps, coding, hardware, linux, music, open source, opinion, oss, pulseaudio, software, sound, x11

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Firstly, the image you have is my modification of Mike M's original image. Please cite it. (I created the modification specifically for my Ohio LinuxFest 2008 talk on audio, and it is redistributable in any fashion as long as both Mike M and myself are mentioned.)

Secondly, as much as some people may abhor it, PulseAudio is not going away. It is actively developed, and future versions will have proper handoff with JACK.

Thirdly, you really need to mention Lennart's evolving guide to writing good Linux audio apps.

#1 Daniel T Chen (Homepage) on 2009-04-21 14:30 (Reply)

Hey Daniel,

Yes I read your blog regularly and that's where I sourced the image.

As the image had original source information on it....I thought that was it.

I'm happy to cite your reference: http://www.ohiolinux.org/files/downloads/2008/slides/unbreaking-audio.pdf

I have no opinion for or against PulseAudio. However as most users -- I think audio should 'just work'. It does in other competing Operating Systems.

#1.1 Matt (Homepage) on 2009-04-21 17:04 (Reply)

Lovely picture, I'm just starting to disentangle my system from Pulse and am writing a JACK pro-audio mixer app, but could you please put some arrows showing where the control stream and the audio stream push data in and get it out of the system? Two planes of coding: control vs. data (dotted vs. solid or something) then a "threat-level" kind of thing for the most commonly or appropriately abstracted entry point - green - and the most aggressive/dangerous calls (e.g. straight to the memory of the IO card) in red.

I'm an audio user, but I work for a DAW and Livesound/hardware manufacturer, so I'm also a deep-dive developer ... no fear.

Thanks, great site.

#2 Duncan Gray (Homepage) on 2010-06-22 22:25 (Reply)

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