Vortragsdetails

Fixing the Linux Audio Stack

von Lennart Poettering (University of Hamburg)

Freitag, 01.06.2007, Saal 3: Berlin, 12:00-13:00 Uhr

Desktop audio on Linux is a mess. There are just too many competing, incompatible sound systems around. Most current audio applications have to support every sound system in parallel and thus ship with sound abstraction layers with a more or less large number of backend plugins. JACK clients are incompatible with ALSA clients, which in turn are incompatible with OSS clients, which in turn are incompatible with ESD clients, and so on. "Incompatible" usually means "exclusive", i.e. if an OSS application gets access to the audio hardware, all ALSA applications cannot access it.

MacOSX has CoreAudio, Win XP has a new userspace audio layer, both manage to provide comprehensive APIs that make almost every user happy, ranging from desktop users to pro audio people. Both systems provide fairly modern, easy-to-use audio APIs, and a vast range of features including desktop audio "bling".

On Linux we should be able to provide the same: a common solution that works on the desktop, in networked thin-client setups and in pro audio environments, scaling from mobile phones to desktop PCs and high-end audio hardware.

In my talk I want to discuss what we can do about this, how a userspace sound system should look like, how we need to deal with the special requirements of networked audio and pro-audio stuff, how we should expose the sound system to desktop applications for allowing Compiz-style desktop "bling" for audio. I then will introduce the PulseAudio sound server as an attempt to fix the Linux audio mess, already providing compatibility with 90% of all current Linux audio software, low-latency and network transparency in an extensible desktop sound server. PulseAudio is now part of many distributions, and is likely to become the default sound system on Fedora and Ubuntu desktops in the next release of these distributions.

The talk is intended for "power users", developers and distributors and everyone else interested in the future of the Linux desktop audio stack. The audience is expected to have a basic understanding of digital audio and what is currently available in that area on the Linux desktop.

Über den Autor Lennart Poettering:

Born in Guatemala City, grown up in Rio de Janeiro and Hamburg, Lennart
Poettering is now about to finish his Diplomarbeit (master thesis) in Computer Science at the University of Hamburg, Germany. He is the lead developer and maintainer of a few popular Free Software projects, including PulseAudio (http://pulseaudio.org/) and Avahi (http://avahi.org/) which are now integral part of all major Linux distributions. His interests in Free Software range from Linux kernel hacking to low-level systems programming and GNOME desktop development. For an (incomplete) list of the Free Software projects he maintains see http://0pointer.de/lennart/