Post Syndicated from Lennart Poettering original https://0pointer.net/blog/projects/the-linux-audio-stack.html

As kind of a followup to my Guide to Linux
Sound APIs here’re some pretty graphics I just drew. (At least “pretty” to
the degree of my limited drawing abilities). It’s a block diagram depicting the
Linux audio stack. A lot of people already drew something similar, and often
enough the result was horribly complicated and — in its conclusion
disappointing. So, here’s my try:

The components interface each other across the horizontal lines. The
vertical lines seperate unrelated components. The drawing only includes
modern, supported APIs and systems as described in the aforementioned blog
article. It (hopefully) shows that things in the Linux audio world are not
all that bad at all and we have workable answers for most questions without
too much complexity, although they might not entirely make everyone overly
happy.

In an outburst of bias I completely ommited KDE-specific technologies from
this drawing. I guess even if I would have included them it’d be called biased
anyway, so why bother? Also, they would have distracted the reader and complicated the
drawing considerably due to KDE’s affection for pluggable backends. So: if you
care about KDE, please ignore this diagram.