[arch-general] Basic questions about Linux's sound system

[Peter Nabbefeld]

Am 31.01.2017 um 07:50 schrieb Leonid Isaev:
> On Tue, Jan 31, 2017 at 07:24:29AM +0100, Peter Nabbefeld wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> semms I'm missing some basic parts of the sound system. I've been told, ALSA
>> is for the hardware, pulseaudio is for the infrastructure, and bluez
>> provides for virtual bluetooth devices, so I understand it should look like
>> this (ASCII graphics, please use monospaced font for viewing):
>>
>>
>>
>>    +------------+   +-----------+
>>    | Rosegarden |   |   Totem   |
>>    +------------+   +-----------+   +-----------------+
>>    |   Jack     |   | GStreamer |   | Appl. using PA  |
>>    +------------+---+-----------+---+-----------------+
>>    |                Pulseaudio (PA)                   |
>>    +--------------------+---+-------------------------+
>>    |        ALSA        |   |         Bluez           |
>>    +--------------------+   +-------------------------+
>>
>>
>> This would imply, that ALSA cannot "see" Bluetooth devices, but that seems
>> not to be the fact, so there's probably a misconfiguration on my laptop.
>> There's a bridge (bluez-alsa-git) in the AUR, but I haven't installed it, so
>> why can ALSA see my headset?
>
> ALSA "sees" audio devices as reported by the kernel. If the kernel / udev
> registers your bluetooth headset as an audio device, you should be able to
> control it through ALSA. This is similar to USB network adapters, for example.
>
> Cheers,
>
Thank You!  :)

Kind regards
P.