Linux Audio Output APIs

About a month ago I took a long afternoon being like "Okay whatever let's see how deep the rabbit hole of linux audio playback goes" (previously, previously). That was a mistake I guess but let's at least avoid others from doing the same and so share what I did as it's fairly complete (patches with reference/citations welcome btw).

I consider here as an Audio Output API any reused code which takes a PCM audio stream as input and which is designed to end up to the sound card at some point. In a simple system there should just be some decoders and cross-platform librairies going to the system native API (ones which are nicely desgined being SunAudio and Plan9 audio).

You'll definitely need a large screen if you want to see the whole thing at once.

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Changelog

2021-09-11
New paths: sox → sndio ; OpenAL → sndio Removed "OpenSL ES", it's pretty much Android-only, which is considered out-of-scope Removed "network card" target, it should be redone per-protocol, in probably a dedicated graph Removed "filesystem" and "null" targets, this is more for diagnostics purposes and graphviz doesn't have layers Removed "?" target, in favor of going nowhere Added Legend

Cleaned out variant

This is a variant which only contains APIs/software which is available in current distributions rather than including all the paths that are technically still present in codebases.

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SVG: access to URLs and can hover lines to see origin and destination
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Linux Audio Output APIs

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Changelog

Cleaned out variant

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See Also