There are 5 different alsa-packages: The alsa-driver package contains the driver module sources. The alsa-lib package contains a Library for sound access methods provided by the alsa-driver. The alsa-utils package contains the tools alsamixer, a ncurses based console mixer, alsactl, a control program for the driver, aplay, a simple player for .wav and .au files, and arecord, a simple sound recorder. The alsa-oss-lib package (only version 0.9.x) contains a library for developers to convert their OSS applications to ALSA. The alsa-tools package (only version 0.9.x) contains some utlis for older cards and for expensive multichannel cards.