In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used.
A sound card is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term sound card is also applied to external audio interfaces used for professional audio applications.
Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers.
The Open Sound System (OSS) is an interface for making and capturing sound in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is based on standard Unix devices system calls. The term also sometimes refers to the software in a Unix kernel that provides the OSS interface; it can be thought of as a device driver for sound controller hardware. The goal of OSS is to allow the writing of sound-based applications that are agnostic of the underlying sound hardware.
A digital audio workstation is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer. Regardless of configuration, modern DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece.
Rosegarden is a free software digital audio workstation program developed for Linux with ALSA, JACK and Qt4. It acts as an audio and MIDI sequencer, scorewriter, and musical composition and editing tool. It is intended to be a free alternative to such applications as Cubase.
Renoise is a digital audio workstation (DAW) based upon the heritage and development of tracker software. Its primary use is the composition of music using sound samples, soft synths, and effects plug-ins. It is also able to interface with MIDI and OSC equipment. The main difference between Renoise and other music software is the characteristic vertical timeline sequencer used by tracking software.
A sound server is software that manages the use of and access to audio devices. It commonly runs as a background process.
MusE is computer software, a sequencer for Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and audio, with recording and editing abilities. It was originally written by Werner Schweer and now is developed by the MusE development team. It is free software released under GPL-2.0-or-later.
The Linux kernel provides multiple interfaces to user-space and kernel-mode code that are used for varying purposes and that have varying properties by design. There are two types of application programming interface (API) in the Linux kernel:
- the "kernel–user space" API; and
- the "kernel internal" API.
ALSA or alsa can refer to:
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, including Windows Subsystem for Linux on Microsoft Windows and Termux on Android; various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and macOS; as well as Illumos distributions and the Solaris operating system. It serves as a middleware in between applications and hardware and handles raw PCM audio streams.
Ubuntu Studio is a recognized flavor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, which is geared to general multimedia production. The original version, based on Ubuntu 7.04, was released on 10 May 2007.
Softvol is an Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) plugin that adds a software based volume control to the ALSA audio mixer (alsamixer). This is helpful when a sound card does not have a hardware volume control. The softvol plugin is built into ALSA and does not require a separate installation.
Calculate Linux is a Linux distribution optimized for fast deployment in an organization environment. It is based on the Gentoo Linux project and includes many preconfigured functions.
Quod Libet is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. The main design philosophy is that the user knows how they want to organize their music best; the software is therefore built to be fully customizable and extensible using regular expressions and boolean logic. Quod Libet is based on GTK and written in Python, and uses the Mutagen tagging library.
B-Step Sequencer is a multitrack software MIDI step sequencer that is available as either a standalone application or in audio plug-in format. Primarily used to create melodical sequences to trigger soft or hardware synthesizer, whether in a studio environment or live on stage, it has a user interface based on pattern and TR music sequencers.
Yoshimi is an open-source software synthesizer for Linux. It contains three synthesis engines, using additive, subtractive and wavetable synthesis. Any single patch can use one or all. A kit mode allows a patch to have up to 16 of engine sets to support multi-layered sounds/drum kits. A complete setup or instance can contain anywhere from one to sixty-four patches.
DeaDBeeF is an audio player software available for Windows, Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. An ad-supported Android version is available, but has not been updated since 2017. DeaDBeeF is free and open-source software, except on Android.
