Advanced Linux Sound Architecture

ALSA
Screenshot of Alsamixer 1.0.14
Original author	Jaroslav Kysela
Developer	ALSA team
Release	1998 (1998)
Stable release	1.2.16.1 / 12 June 2026 (12 June 2026)
Written in	C
Operating system	Linux
Type	Audio device drivers Loadable kernel module
License	GPL-2.0-or-later LGPL-2.1-or-later
Website	alsa-project.org

The Linux API is composed out of the System Call Interface of the Linux kernel, the GNU C Library (by GNU), libdrm, libalsa and libevdev (by freedesktop.org).

ALSA is part of the Linux kernel. Sound servers (such as PulseAudio) and higher-level APIs (such as SDL) are middleware.

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) is a software framework and part of the Linux kernel that provides an application programming interface (API) for sound card device drivers.

Some of the goals of the ALSA project at its inception were automatic configuration of sound-card hardware and graceful handling of multiple sound devices in a system. ALSA is released under GPL-2.0-or-later and LGPL-2.1-or-later.

On Linux, sound servers, like sndio, PulseAudio, JACK (low-latency professional-grade audio editing and mixing) and PipeWire, and higher-level APIs (e.g., OpenAL, SDL audio, etc.) work on top of ALSA and its sound card device drivers. ALSA succeeded the older Linux port of the Open Sound System (OSS).