[LAU] Reference or HOWTO?

[Julien Claassen]

Hi!
   A few of your questions are relatively simple to answer.
   How does alsa relate to jack? Alsa is your soundcard driver. If you don't 
have that (or alsa's predecessor OSS) then you won't have any sound at all. 
JACK is a soundserver. It sits on top of alsa and offers a few more things in 
software and it keeps watch so everything's in time. That's roughly spoken, 
but it should suffice for the beginning.  Why don't some of my programs have 
any sound at all, when jack is running? As I said: JACK sits ontop of alsa. It 
is just like any program, that uses alsa intensively. It blocks all your 
soundcards ins and outs. Naturally, if you use pure alsa and start a 
complicated sound-app, that has to use all your inputs and outputs, no other 
program will have sound at that moment.
   What is OSS (explicitly)? OSS is a soundcard driver (like alsa). Only in 
practise really MOST of us don't use it anymore. There a re a few older 
programs around, that only offer OSS-support. Luckily alsa can emulate OSS. 
That means: alsa can act as if it was OSS. To get some more complex features 
of OSS through alsa, you should install some library called: libaoss or 
something like it. For simple playback and captre through /dev/dsp your 
average alsa-installation will suffice.
   I think there should be relatively up-to-date materials about jack and what 
it is. If you know windows, jackd has a roughly similar job to windows' 
rewire. Ithink jackd covers more ground in addition though.
   Hope that helps for a start.
   Kindest regards
            Julien

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