Ohhhhhh the newbies don’t remember EsounD (Enlightenment Enlightened Sound Daemon). Basically, it was an attempt at doing PulseAudio-esque stuff way back in the OSS era. Which is to say, it just supported software mixing of multiple audio sources, because OSS usually only allowed single process to output audio. EsounD was janky and didn’t work well, obviously. Probably the neatest thing about it was that it exposed the mixed output stream to any other app, so that made visualisers much easier to make (edit: another thing that newbies in this day and age don’t realise, but I cannot emphasise enough how crucial visualisers were for the late 1990s / early 2000s music experience). ALSA basically supported hardware mixing (if available) out of the box, so of course it immediately became my favourite.
Ohhhhhh the newbies don’t remember EsounD (
EnlightenmentEnlightened Sound Daemon). Basically, it was an attempt at doing PulseAudio-esque stuff way back in the OSS era. Which is to say, it just supported software mixing of multiple audio sources, because OSS usually only allowed single process to output audio. EsounD was janky and didn’t work well, obviously. Probably the neatest thing about it was that it exposed the mixed output stream to any other app, so that made visualisers much easier to make (edit: another thing that newbies in this day and age don’t realise, but I cannot emphasise enough how crucial visualisers were for the late 1990s / early 2000s music experience). ALSA basically supported hardware mixing (if available) out of the box, so of course it immediately became my favourite.