Re: Sound docs?

[Bijan Soleymani <bijan@psq.com>]

On Tue, 2003-06-17 at 22:27, Jeremy Brooks wrote:
> Does anybody know of a good link that explains the differences between
> esd, alsa, and oss, and how these different thing can/should interact to
> allow sound to work well under linux?

OSS is one family of sound drivers.

Alsa is another.

Some people swear by one, some people by the other. OSS is still the
standard sound driver in the Linux kernel, but that may change soon.

Esd is a piece of software that allows several sound sources to be mixed
together or sent over the network etc. However performance is pretty bad
because of all the work that the cpu and the network must do. It's ok
for listening to music, but a bit laggy for playing quake.

> Sound remains my weak point in the linux experience.  :)
I got myself an SBLive! (any card with an emu10k chip should work). It's
pretty decent under Gnu/Linux. The OSS drivers let me play sound from
multiple apps at the same time, with hardware mixing so it doesn't slow
down my performance.

Bijan