Hacker News Reader

Comment by gen2brain | Hacker News Reader

Whenever someone mentions Linux and Audio I always remember this image (made by Adobe I think) https://harmful.cat-v.org/software/operating-systems/linux/a.... It is missing Pipewire but it should be easy to add a dozen of new lines. This is the reason why I simply use plain ALSA without any sound daemons.

View on HN

That's about maximum mess historically but thankfully most stuff on that diagram is no longer present in a modern install. And that's before pipewire which has further unified the stack.

Pipewire hasn't really unified anything, it's just pw -> alsa -> hardware instead of pa -> alsa -> hardware for the common case.

And not much has fallen out of use. OpenAL, libao, jack, portaudio, libcanberra, Gstreamer and phonon at least are still used widely, and a bunch of others keep cropping up occasionally in cross-platform software.

And then there is Pipewire with PulseAudio plugin, and not to mention you can compile Pipewire with support for GStreamer, Jack, etc. I guess we can remove only the Arts and ESD daemons from that list, but the mess just adds up.

Aren't most of the libs you mentioned cross-platform or with a very specific use in mind which have direct analogues in Windows world?

Correct. You can draw just as messy a diagram for Windows. DirectSound versus OpenAL versus gstreamer(win32) versus jack(win32) versus XAudio2 versus DirectShow versus DirectMusic versus WDM Audio versus WASAPI versus UAA versus …

If there's any difference it's that under Windows, the only debugging and error handling you have is "lol reinstall all drivers and codecs and pray".

My understanding is that pipewire finally unifies JACK and Pulseaudio. You no longer have to decide if you want a general audio setup or a low-latency one, there's a single audio server now that does everything well.

So from that list the unification is now:

- JACK and Pulseaudio are both replaced by pipewire

- OSS is long gone, ALSA is now the only low-level interface

- ESD, NAS, ClanLib, xine, portaudio, allegro and Phonon are not present in the Ubuntu install I just checked

Basically we're down to a unified stack that has BlueZ and ALSA to access actual hardware and pipewire as the single audio (and video) daemon. Everything else is either shims so apps don't need to change interface or cross platform APIs like SDL and OpenAL. We are much better than what this diagram shows.

On an infinite featureless plain with spherical cows, yes, in theory we've "unified" everything, as soon as closed source software stops existing (together with BSDs) and everyone rewrites their audio stacks everywhere. (Just like we had unified almost everything before pipewire was invented.)

In practice, OSS and Jack still stick around, as do portaudio, libao and others.

There is still an ALSA OSS emulation in the kernel, probably distros do not enable it but I have had it enabled for years. All it needs is some ioctl system calls, which does everything for me internally. ALSA with just system calls and without libalsa can work for some cards but it would be hit and miss. I like that I can use OSS in Go without C/CGo, i.e. https://github.com/gen2brain/oss.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com