Pipewire vs PulseAudio, general question

My Password Is 1234@lemmy.world to Linux@lemmy.ml – 59 points –

What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio? Which one is better? What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?

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Can you elaborate on what specifically makes ALSA bad, and what you mean by HAL audio drivers?

I answered below, you can also read on any of the ALSA pages as well as the wiki page for it. Wealth of knowledge on the subject is available

https://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm.html

After application transfers the data in the memory areas, then it must be acknowledged the end of transfer via snd_pcm_mmap_commit() function to allow the ALSA library update the pointers to ring buffer. This kind of communication is also called "zero-copy", because the device does not require to copy the samples from application to another place in system memory.

When you tell RTFM expect to see manual stating opposite of your point.

That's still not direct hardware, if you think you cracked the code then by all means show everyone otherwise, this would be a huge deal for a lot of people

Not direct enough? It literally says it will send your buffer straight to soundcard without creating any additional buffers.

Other people under this post complain of ALSA being too direct.