Audio on Linux The End of a Golden Age

[khz]

Audio on Linux The End of a Golden Age
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ-wxwplEms
https://elinux.org/images/e/e7/Audio_on_Linux.pdf

[tux99]

Can you please summarise what it is about?

It not very helpful to just post a link to a 1 hour long video without any explanation.
(the slides aren't exactly self-explanatory either)

[nilshi]

The video is about consumer audio only and deals with the Linux kernel, not Desktop distributions in particular.

It has little to no meaning for music production and therefore this forum.

The first half an hour is just history of audio in Linux in general: Drivers, kernel integration and finally sound servers (the ones of KDE, Gnome etc.).
That part ends with "Now we have PulseAudio and finally a unified way of handling audio playback. Everything is well". That is the "golden age".

The second part raises awareness for the problem that mobile and embedded devices with the Linux Kernel exist but diverge with drivers and api once more so our unified happy place is gone and we should work more on it.

[CrocoDuck]

It has little to no meaning for music production and therefore this forum.

I think it might have in the not so distant future, as pro-audio and consumer soundcards might start implementing architectures more similar to the dedicated DSP chips that are used in embedded and mobile nowadays, the reason being that they would offer much more performance at pretty much no latency. This topic is mentioned here: https://youtu.be/-GhleKNaPdk

The use of DSP chips in soundcards to take away audio processing from the CPU is somewhat similar to the use of GPUs in video cards. So, if this trend expands then the Linux audio stack will need to adapt likewise.

[sadko4u]

Pulseaudio is not a silver bullet.
In my cases PulseAudio ALWAYS worked bad, especially with new built-in into motherboard cards.
Mixers and controls are also inadequate.
I would better prefer JACK could support more than one device.

[tramp]

I would better prefer JACK could support more than one device.

This one is a interesting solution to support multiple sound cards within jack.
viewtopic.php?f=27&t=19475

[sadko4u]

Hmm, it's currently looking out as a great hack.
I would like to see JACK that utilizes all soundcards. One sound card is considered to be primary, with minimal latency, all other cards are considered as secondary, so JACK will be solving jitter problems for them (for example, we can configure jitter buffer size for each card).