Table of Contents

Contents

Making Sound Just Work

One of the “second tier” of requirements mentioned several times at the OSDL Portland Linux Desktop Architects workshop was “making audio on Linux just work”. Many people find it easy to leave this requirement lying around in various lists of goals and requirements, but before we can make any progress on defining a plan to implement the goal, we first need to define it rather more precisely.

This list is intended to avoid any implementation details, and is focused entirely on a task oriented analysis of the issues. Your input is sought to complete, improve and clarify this analysis.

DEFINING THE GOAL

The list below is a set of tasks that a user could reasonably expect to perform on a computer running Linux that has access to zero, one or more audio interfaces, as well as zero one or more network interfaces.

The desired task should either work, or produce a sensible and comprehensible error message explaining why it failed. For example, attempting to control input gain on a device that has no hardware mixer should explain that the device has no controls for input gain.

CONFIGURATION (see also MIXING below)

PLAYBACK

VOIP

RECORDING

MIXING

ROUTING

MULTIUSER

FORMATS

MISC