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.
Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows. Its primary author is Paul Davis, who was also responsible for the JACK Audio Connection Kit. It is intended as a digital audio workstation suitable for professional use.
In computing, the Windows Driver Model (WDM) – also known at one point as the Win32 Driver Model – is a framework for device drivers that was introduced with Windows 98 and Windows 2000 to replace VxD, which was used on older versions of Windows such as Windows 95 and Windows 3.1, as well as the Windows NT Driver Model.
Steinberg Media Technologies GmbH is a German musical software and hardware company based in Hamburg. It develops music writing, recording, arranging, and editing software, most notably Cubase, Nuendo, and Dorico. It also designs audio and MIDI hardware interfaces, controllers, and iOS/Android music apps including Cubasis. Steinberg created several industry standard music technologies including the Virtual Studio Technology (VST) format for plug-ins and the ASIO protocol. Steinberg has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Yamaha since 2005.
Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is an audio plug-in software interface that integrates software synthesizers and effects units into digital audio workstations. VST and similar technologies use digital signal processing to simulate traditional recording studio hardware in software. Thousands of plugins exist, both commercial and freeware, and many audio applications support VST under license from its creator, Steinberg.
A digital audio workstation (DAW) 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.
DirectSound is a deprecated software component of the Microsoft DirectX library for the Windows operating system, superseded by XAudio2. It provides a low-latency interface to sound card drivers written for Windows 95 through Windows XP and can handle the mixing and recording of multiple audio streams. DirectSound was originally written for Microsoft by John Miles.
The Linux kernel provides several interfaces to user-space applications that are used for different purposes and that have different properties by design. There are two types of application programming interface (API) in the Linux kernel that are not to be confused: the "kernel–user space" API and the "kernel internal" API.
PortAudio is an open-source computer library for audio playback and recording. It is a cross-platform library, so programs using it can run on many different computer operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. PortAudio supports Core Audio, ALSA, and MME, DirectSound, ASIO and WASAPI on Windows. Like other libraries whose primary goal is portability, PortAudio is written in the C programming language. It has also been implemented in the languages PureBasic and Lazarus/Free Pascal. PortAudio is based on a callback paradigm, similar to JACK and ASIO.
Sound Blaster Audigy is a product line of sound cards from Creative Technology. The flagship model of the Audigy family used the EMU10K2 audio DSP, an improved version of the SB-Live's EMU10K1, while the value/SE editions were built with a less-expensive audio controller.
PulseAudio is a network-capable sound server program distributed via the freedesktop.org project. It runs mainly on Linux, various BSD distributions such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, 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.
This article describes audio APIs and components in Microsoft Windows which are now obsolete or deprecated.
The Media Vision Pro AudioSpectrum family of personal computer sound cards included the original 8-bit Pro AudioSpectrum (1991), the 8-bit Pro AudioSpectrum Plus, 16-bit Pro AudioSpectrum 16, Pro AudioSpectrum 16 Basic and 16-bit Pro Audio Studio. All PAS cards with the exception of Pro AudioSpectrum 16 Basic could connect to CD-ROM drives—variants having SCSI or various proprietary interfaces—and many were sold in multimedia kits with compatible CD-ROM drives.
LinuxSampler is music sampler software under active development as of 2022, aiming to provide a pure software audio sampler with professional grade features comparable to both hardware and commercial software samplers, as well as to introduce new features not yet available by other samplers. Much of LinuxSampler is free software, but commercial reuse of some, such as the back-end, is restricted.
Latency refers to a short period of delay between when an audio signal enters a system and when it emerges. Potential contributors to latency in an audio system include analog-to-digital conversion, buffering, digital signal processing, transmission time, digital-to-analog conversion and the speed of sound in the transmission medium.
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.
Binary-code compatibility is a property of a computer system, meaning that it can run the same executable code, typically machine code for a general-purpose computer CPU, that another computer system can run. Source-code compatibility, on the other hand, means that recompilation or interpretation is necessary before the program can be run on the compatible system.
A software effect processor is a computer program which is able to modify the signal coming from a digital audio source in real time.
Voicemeeter is a virtual mixing console and sound card running on the Windows operating system. It allows the processing of any audio signal – whether its source is physical (microphone) or virtual (application) – and its transmission to physical audio devices and/or applications.
