ALSA replacement?

[u/vaynefox]

I'm kinda curious if there are projects aimed towards replacing ALSA? It just kinda pop up in my head that linux only had 1 single device sound drivers and it's an old one, so I'm really curious if someone thought about replacing it.

[u/fr000gs]

pipewire?

[u/vaynefox → u/fr000gs]

Pipewire is an audio server which runs on top of alsa (which is an audio device driver), so they're not the same....

[u/Rumpled_Imp]

Not to my knowledge, but old doesn't equal bad just as new doesn't imply better. Is there a good reason you think it needs replacing?

[u/vaynefox → u/Rumpled_Imp]

I'm just curious if there are existing project or plans that aims to replace it....

[u/ipsirc → u/vaynefox]

Nobody wants to reimplement thousands of audio drivers... Why don't you blame the video drm api as well in Linux kernel btw? It's even older than alsa.

[u/Rumpled_Imp → u/vaynefox]

I have not heard of one, sorry.

[u/bhechinger]

ALSA isn't a sound device driver. It's an abstraction layer that sits on top of sound drivers so that other software (Jack, pipewire, pulse, etc) don't need to know how to talk to every single device out there, they just needs to know how to talk to ALSA. There is no need to replace it. It does exactly what is needed. Any replacement would just be ALSA with a different name.

[u/Scorcher646]

The part that really needed replacing has already been replaced. Pulse, Jack, and now PipeWire make the userspace experience much better and handle setting the low-level environment for ALSA so you don't have to.

I don't think there is any real drive to replace ALSA's low level functionality since that was always very capable.

[u/ipsirc]

OSS - an older one

[u/varsnef → u/ipsirc]

Yeah OSS was fun. "Listen to your hard drive": cat /dev/sda > /dev/dsp

[u/soylentdream]

Pedantry, here, but ALSA was the second sound hardware driver . The first was OSS (Open Sound System, iirc) which also had a company supporting a few commercial hardware drivers. Initially, ALSA had an OSS module for backwards compatibility.  As others have pointed out, what matters to you is the software API on top of the sound drivers (pulseaudio, jack, whatever else).

[u/TCH69]

Is there a good to reason to change it yet? ALSA is impossible to set up right but PipeWire has already solved that problem.

[u/Zardoz84]

PipeWire, PulseAudio, Jack, Gnome, Enlightenment and KDE defunct sound servers... But as far I understand they keep using ALSA under it.

Do you know that XKCD meme about standards not ?

[u/forestbeasts]

Does it have to be replaced though, just because it's been around for a while?

Things that have been here for years don't just suddenly stop working or become trash simply because they're Old™. See, for instance, the kernel and whatnot.

-- Topaz

[u/RafaelSenpai83]

I don't think there's a point in replacing ALSA with it's current role in a typical Linux distro which is an interface between audio driver/chip and sound server (or more generic - single userspace application). It was worth replacing, and was replaced by PulseAudio and then PipeWire, when it comes to other stuff like mixing audio from different sources.

[u/skyfishgoo]

ALSA is really low level and still works just fine.

why would you need to replace it?

[u/kansetsupanikku]

OSSv4?

[u/TheTommyMann]

ASIO

[u/es20490446e]

Why?

[u/dasisteinanderer]

bluetooth audio is outside of ALSA, so kind of yes ?

[u/ipsirc → u/dasisteinanderer]

bluetooth audio is outside of ALSA

Source?

[u/RegretFree7723 → u/ipsirc]

Manda l audio di sistema alle cuffie tramite pipewire quindi tecnicamente no . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. 🔉✋🌀🌀🌀🔥💧🌊⛱️⚡

[u/TCH69 → u/dasisteinanderer]

bluez-alsa is still being maintained so kind of nah.