Date: Thu, 25 May 2023 08:07:44 +0200 From: Ralf Mardorf <ralf-mardorf@riseup.net> To: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Overview of Linux and FreeBSD sound systems? Message-ID: <caaeb89f70fdb7cdb728a970686d49553731c770.camel@riseup.net> In-Reply-To: <718e2b3e-3c57-d9b5-642e-6f6b54b896ce@Gmail.com> References: <718e2b3e-3c57-d9b5-642e-6f6b54b896ce@Gmail.com>
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Hi, in simple words: On Wed, 2023-05-24 at 21:16 -0400, Steven Friedrich wrote: > ALSA Driver level, usually only one app can grab/use an audio device. Multiple audio streams can be used by the dmix plugin. > Sox A converter to convert an audio file from one to another format. > Pulse Pulseaudio is a desktop environment sound server, it doesn't allow to be used with low-latency, but can resample and more. It does use the ALSA backend and allows different apps to access a single audio device by the ALSA backend. The apps can use different sample rates. aRts was kind of a precursor to pulseaudio. It's discontinued. > Phonon KDE multimedia API, not really a sound server. > Jack Jackd is a real-time, low-latency sound server used with the ALSA backend for PCI, PCIe and USB audio devices, for firewire another backend is used. It doesn't resample or do other things. It allows several apps to access a single audio device by the backend. All apps need to use the same sample rate. Pipewire has also existed for some time, but AFAIK it's still not ready for production environments. "PipeWire is a project that aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. It provides a low-latency, graph-based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both PulseAudio and JACK." - https://pipewire.org/ On Linux I'm either using plain ALSA for "normal desktop usage", since to me it doesn't make sense to use more than one audio stream at a time, unless I'm producing music. To make music I'm using jackd with the ALSA backend. However, nowadays I usually use a proprietary fruit when making music. Regards, Ralf
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