sound over USB

[Sid Spry]

On Tue, May 12, 2020, at 11:43 AM, Subhashini Rao Beerisetty wrote> 
>
> How do I use it for playing and recording an audio?
> 
> Basically first I want to gain knowledge on set of test cases I can
> run on ALSA and then learn ALSA kernel modules stuff including
> snd_usb_audio mdule.
> 
> So please guide me by providing related documentation/Steps.
> 

Hi, searching for an ALSA tutorial will get you far. However on a modern Linux distribution you will likely want to target pulseaudio. There are other libraries like RtAudio or PortAudio that may be easier to use and are cross platform.

ALSA seems to give the most reliable results when enumerating audio devices. This can be done when pulseaudio is installed. The pulseaudio results are harder to interpret.

In my experience, and not necessarily targeted at you, I have experienced massive difficulties getting RtAudio and PortAudio working in a reproducible way. ALSA is the most reliable but an unusual configuration, and pulseaudio is a hot complicated mess.


For what it's worth, the sound API on Linux is so pointlessly complex that I have, in the past, created a custom USB driver to avoid going through the sound API. It was easier to use libusb and get raw samples.