Introduction

ALSA or Advanced Linux Sound Architecture is a project, which seeks to provide MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system. ALSA has the following significant features.

Features

Effcient support for all soundcards from consumer to professional multichannel audio devices
Fully modularized sound drivers
SMP and thread-safe design
alsa-lib in order to simplify the high level API
Support for the older OSS API.

ALSA over OSS

There are many advantages ALSA has over the older (but perhaps not the newer) OSS API:

multi-thread safe design
transparent use of plugin architecture to handle format,rate,channel cnt and many other conversions
support for non-interleaved interfaces
user-space software mixing (dmix)
user-space "loopback/snoop" capabilities
merging multiple cards into a single virtual device
hiding non-ALSA-drivers behind a consistent user-space API (e.g. IEEE1394 drivers, or JACK)
consistent and generic control API for managing hardware controls
Flexible mixer architecture to handle modern audio interfaces fully (rather than reducing them to a simplistic device)
consistent support for multiple instances of the same card
linked operations of multiple cards

Development API

Tutorials

ALSA Library API

ALSA Documentation

External links

ALSA wiki a large wiki pertaining to major ALSA related topics.