How do ALSA and PulseAudio relate?
Problem
While trying to get my sound to work, I was wondering about the roles of ALSA and PulseAudio. I have both installed and was wondering, for example, which of them needs to know about my sound card. Both seem to be able to use each other, there's a pulseaudio plugin for ALSA, and on my system, alsa shows up as a sound card in pulseaudio. Which of the two does what, are they alternatives or complementary?
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Fix for: How do ALSA and PulseAudio relate?
ALSA is the kernel level sound mixer, it manages your sound card directly. ALSA by itself can only handle one application at a time. Of course, there is 'dmix', which was written to solve this problem. (It's an ALSA module.) PulseAudio is a software mixer, on top of the userland (like you'd run an app). When it runs, it uses Alsa - without dmix - and manages every kind of mixing, the devices, network devices, everything by itself. In 2014, you can still run only ALSA. But unless you compile you…
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