
Sndio: a small audio and MIDI framework part of the OpenBSD project - setra
http://www.sndio.org/
======
brynet
This is the native audio subsystem used by OpenBSD, it includes a library
(libsndio) and a privsep server (sndiod). There was a massive successful
undertaking to write backends for most 3rd party audio software in the ports
tree, things like chromium, and it is now included upstream in SDL, OpenAL,
Mozilla Firefox, mpd, etc.

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bnolsen
voidlinux's firefox package has sndio support in it. It takes very little cpu
to run this unlike pulseaudio which would kill this little underpowered laptop
I'm currently on (several generations old sual dore atom).

~~~
bkor
For Pulseaudio please file bugreports. Could be that it's transcoding things
(44.1kHz to 48kHz conversion, etc).

I have a pretty slow CPU (NUC5PPYH) and Pulseaudio has been working fine for
loads of years.

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rushsteve1
I know very very little about audio frameworks, but what does sndio have over
it's competition? It is clearly a simpler and likely cleaner system than
PulseAudio, but what about compared to ALSA and OSS?

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isatty
I've never heard of someone preferring PulseAudio to ALSA

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black_knight
Pulse audio is OK for routing audio around. It even supports LADSPA filters
through a module. So I’ve used it when playing Dungeons & Dragons over Mumble,
to filter my voice when role-playing monsters (nothing beats a little reverb
and pitch tuning to make the monster boss more frightening to the players) and
putting music into the channel. I would not know how to do that with ALSA. But
Pulse Audio uses ALSA, so...

That said, JACK is much better for routing audio through applications. And
jack-rack actually lets you change the parameters of LADSPA filters without
reloading. And it is easy to get a graphical mixer up controlling individually
the volume from all the sources.

~~~
nightcracker
I've tried 3 times in the past to run JACK on Ubuntu. Each time I had bricked
audio after installing, tried to fix for around 1-2 hours and gave up. My
experience with JACK has been horrible.

~~~
black_knight
I don’t know your setup, but Ubuntu uses PulseAudio as default, and it can
sometimes take the sound devices hostage. There is a package called
pulseaudio-module-jack which will let you output sound from JACK through
PulseAudio. Using qjackctl you can see how everything is connected and direct
it to the pulse source. The pulse source can be connected, to say your
speakers, by loading a loopback module in pactl.

~~~
veli_joza
There's also Cadence from KXStudio repository[0]. It's a replacement for
qjackctrl that can be used to setup pulseaudio-to-jack bridge relatively
painlessly.

[0]
[http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Applications:Cadence](http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Applications:Cadence)

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cjhanks
Can sndio replace Jack?

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fundamental
It doesn't look like sndio targets the application->application audio routing
use-case, nor does it appear to prefer a lower latency audio pull-API. So, it
does not look like by design it can be a jack replacement.

