| 1 | <sect1 id="alsa" xreflabel="alsa-&alsa-version;">
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| 2 | <?dbhtml filename="alsa.html" dir="multimedia"?>
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| 3 | <title>alsa-&alsa-version;</title>
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| 4 |
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| 5 | <para>The first question which people tend to ask about ALSA is why they
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| 6 | should use it over the sound drivers included in the kernel - there are
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| 7 | several reasons. Firstly, the ALSA drivers support more sound cards
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| 8 | than those in the kernel. Secondly, the OSS emulation is in some cases
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| 9 | faster and better than the original OSS driver itself. And finally, there are
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| 10 | some programs which can use ALSA's enhanced features to better drive the
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| 11 | soundcard.</para>
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| 12 |
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| 13 | <para>ALSA is also likely to be the future of Linux Sound (hence the
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| 14 | name <emphasis>Advanced Linux Sound Architecture</emphasis>), and the
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| 15 | ALSA drivers will probably be included into the main linux kernel at
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| 16 | some point during the 2.5 development series, leading eventually to ALSA
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| 17 | being the "standard" sound drivers into the future 2.6 stable
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| 18 | kernel.</para>
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| 19 |
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| 20 | <para>You currently need to decide whether to use the 0.5.x series or
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| 21 | the 0.9-beta series. At the moment, if you use the 0.9.x drivers, some
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| 22 | older software will fail to compile with ALSA support. This is because
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| 23 | there is a new API in the 0.9.x series which isn't yet widely supported.
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| 24 | In these cases it is usually possible just to use the OSS driver
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| 25 | emulation which ALSA supplies (which can be superior to the OSS drivers
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| 26 | themselves). We don't recommend one ALSA series over the other
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| 27 | as there are advantages to both versions, however you should probably
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| 28 | use the latest point release of whichever series you decide to
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| 29 | use.</para>
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| 30 |
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| 31 | &alsa-intro;
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| 32 | &alsa-desc;
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| 33 | &alsa-inst;
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| 34 | &alsa-config;
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| 35 | &alsa-cards;
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| 36 |
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| 37 | </sect1>
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| 38 |
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