ALSA

From openSUSE

Some of the goals of the ALSA project at its inception were:

• automatic configuration of sound-card hardware, and
• graceful handling of multiple sound devices in a system,

which it has largely met. Other audio frameworks, such as JACK, use ALSA to allow performing low-latency professional-grade audio editing and mixing.

Led by Jaroslav Kysela, the project started from a Linux device driver for the Gravis Ultrasound sound card in 1998, and was developed separately from the Linux kernel until it was introduced in the 2.5 development series in 2002 (2.5.4-2.5.5). In the 2.6 version it replaces OSS by default, although a backwards-compatibility layer exists.

ALSA Highlights

1. Efficient support for all types of audio interfaces, from consumer soundcards to professional multichannel audio interfaces.
2. Fully modularized sound drivers.
3. SMP and thread-safe design.
4. User space library (alsa-lib) to simplify application programming and provide higher level functionality.
5. Support for the older OSS API, providing binary compatibility for most OSS programs.

Audio Adapter Support

Out of the box openSUSE supports a lot of audio adapters. There are also several additional drivers that you can download if openSUSE does not support it. There is an extensive list of openSUSE supported sound cards and here is the same for ALSA project.