Hey Terry, ALSA is the way userspace talks to sound cards: You can open a device, send some PCM data, and it comes out a physical sound card. You can change the card's volume, etc. What it doesn't handle is per-application settings, mixing, loopbacks or Bluetooth. Tools like PulseAudio and PipeWire solve this problem. That said, Linux distros (currently?) don't deal well with mixing applications from different users. There's no easy way to have the system say something and have a user playing music at the same time. If anything there's the opposite assumption: A single user gets full access to the hardware at a given time. Using ALSA manually with its fairly simple mixer will allow multiple applications to talk to your sound card, but might break GUI applications. Jookia. On Thu, Jul 11, 2024 at 12:00:30AM -0400, Terry D. Cudney wrote: > I'm happy to lose pulseaudio/pipewire et al and use alsa/dmix. > > Question out of curiosity: What does pulseaudio add; why are distributions seeming to abandon alsa in favour of pulseaudio? > > My naive observation is that pulseaudio just adds a lot of complexity... > > > --terry > > -- > Name: Terry D. Cudney > Telephone: 289-488-4882 ext 1 > E-mail: terry@xxxxxxxxxx
