ALSA has gone in for major changes since version 0.5.xx. series, hence if you have downloaded a version earlier to 0.5.xx series, please refer to an excellent alsa-sound-mini-howto by Valentijn Sessink on the documentation page of this Website. This documentation Alsa-HOWTO is applicable to version 0.5.xx series of Alsa.
Welcome to magical world of digital sound, largely due to tremendous back-breaking efforts by Alsa Team. ALSA - "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture" A set of new generation device drivers for a large number of sound cards in its version 0.5.xx series. With its native PCM interface, highly modularized API and an emulation code for legacy OSS/Free sound drivers, it has truly satisfied an audiophile at one end and an Uninitiated lover of music at the other end of spectrum.If you ask me where it is heading, i should be permitted to quote this:
The ALSA driver is fully ready to be merged with current development kernel 2.3.x kernels (check the utils/kmerge script). We are also ready to maintain the ALSA kernel tree. I'm trying to get some serious information when the merge would be done from Alan Cox (from the first final 0.5.0 release), but I haven't been successfull yet. He is simply much busy to look to the ALSA sources. I don't want to be unpolite to Alan, I'm only doing a resume of facts. | ||
| --Jaroslav Kysela | ||
This is my way of expressing Thank you to each & everybody at the ALSA-Project and as such I make no claims to this documentation being official .This is basically a Rewrite of all that is official and largely cosmetic in nature. If you feel more comfortable with all that is official ;-), please follow this tip below.
Tip: Please check the web site Alsa Website, for the latest drivers and updated documents.