What are the main differences between pipewire and pulseaudio? Which one is better? What are other alternative popular sound servers besides these two?

  • uis@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 years ago

    ASIO is not an audio server running in exclusive mode.

    I never said that. ASIO is a driver running in exclusive mode. ALSA is a driver, that just so happens to be able to run in exclusive mode. If you searched here for “Direct Read / Write transfer”, then you would have seen this:

    After application transfers the data in the memory areas, then it must be acknowledged the end of transfer via snd_pcm_mmap_commit() function to allow the ALSA library update the pointers to ring buffer. This kind of communication is also called “zero-copy”, because the device does not require to copy the samples from application to another place in system memory.