[LAD] A History of Audio on Linux somewhere?

[Matt Flax]

Back in 1999 and just before it was the crossover between ALSA and OSS.

I remember getting help from mailing lists as a newbie, just making your 
first sound using C/C++ was difficult back then !

I don't know if this is the type of thing you are after, but this was my 
developer focus back in those days ....

I produced two software packages which were very experimental and not 
heavily used by others, you can see their original pages here (called 
projects jumbled and dynamic) :

https://web.archive.org/web/19991104182532/http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~flatmax/dynamic/jumbled/jumbled.html

https://web.archive.org/web/19991104155359/http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~flatmax/dynamic/dynamic.html

Interestingly it may have been using OSS ? I can't quite remember.

The original "jumbled" software was a real time CD to MIDI wavetable 
player. The big idea was to play your CDs streaming through the AWE 32's 
RAM wavetable synthesiser. You could apply MIDI hardware effects, you 
can actually still see the keyboard controls : 
https://web.archive.org/web/20000416211019/http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~flatmax/dynamic/jumbled/jumbledCommands.html

It worked quite nicely, except for the fact that the RAM front side bus 
was too slow to pipe 44100 Hz CD audio through the MIDI's RAM. This gave 
the system a looping effect,  where the audio playback would loop a few 
times before being reloaded with the next block of audio from the CD. 
The looping gave it it's name "jumbled". You could trigger a few MIDI 
keys and get the CD's audio played back at different pitches and also 
overly the AWE 32's effects.

The next project was "dynamic" it simplified things to playing CDs 
direct to the sound card. You can also see the sunsite.unc.edu listing, 
with a sample mp3 up there. Project dynamic was unique in that it had 
backwards blocking mode - where blocks of audio were read from CD 
backwards, and also a reverse mode, where the blocks of audio were 
reversed before being played.

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/apps/sound/cdrom/project.dynamic.lsm

Matt

On 25/1/22 19:09, Philip Rhoades wrote:
> People,
>
> I am just a regular user of Linux audio but I am interested in the 
> history of how software was developed and what problems they were 
> meant to solve on Linux eg OSS, ALSA, Jack etc and more recently 
> PipeWire.
>
> Is there such a documented history already in existence on the web 
> somewhere? (ie NOT a HOWTO) - that would be intelligible to non-audio 
> professionals?
>
> I am interested in learning and understanding more about audio and 
> perhaps making better use of my system (Fedora 34 + Wayland soon to be 
> updated to 35).
>
> Thanks,
>
> Phil.