ALSA 1.0.25 Is Out With Many Linux Audio Changes

ALSA, the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, last saw a major update in February of 2011. That changed this morning when ALSA 1.0.25 was released, which is a big feature release.

There's hundreds of changes making up the changes in ALSA 1.0.25 for its drivers and libraries, but below are some of the noteworthy items when I was scanning through the massive change-log found on the ALSA Project Wiki. (You'll just want to check the change-log for the hardware that's relevant to you.)

- The ALSA driver sound core now builds against the newer Linux 3.x kernels. On the matter of maintenance, the support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 was also addressed with a compilation fix.

- Various updates to a few ARM audio drivers like the AACI PL041 and PXA2XX. Various SoC audio drivers have been updated too such as for the Freecale i.MX1x/i.MX2x, TXx9, Atmel AT32/AT91, Samsung, Freescale SGTL5000, MAX, NVIDIA Tegra, Texas Instruments OMAP, and many other system-on-chip drivers. Also included in ALSA 1.0.25 are dynamic audio power management updates for ASoC.

- The CMI8788 Oxygen driver now has S/PDIF input support for all ASUS Xonar sound cards. There's also fixes for the Essence ST sound cards.

- The Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi audio driver has various fixes. This includes support for the newer Creative Titanium HD sound card.

- EMU10K1/EMU10K2, the driver for some earlier and popular Creative Labs sound cards, has received a few fixes.

- The ALSA Firewire driver has a fair amount of fixes and updates.

- The HDA Codec driver has support for new adapters (including the new Apple iMac, Cirrus Logic CS421x, IDT 92HD93, various VIA chips, and others), handles some new quirks, support for more audio streams, some jack changes, improved Realtek support, unified HDMI hot-plug handling, better jack detection, and much more.

- The HDA Intel driver has Oaktrail improvements, fixes for Atom/Poulsbo systems, support for "new AMD products", and a snoop option. There's also audio support for Intel Panther Point, which will be the new Intel motherboard chipset launching at the time of Intel's Ivy Bridge debut.

- The generic HDA audio driver also has a load of fixes and other minor improvements.

- The ALSA USB driver has many fixes, including support for some new hardware (Yamaha MOX6/MOX8, Roland GAIA SH-01, Cakewalk UM-1G, Traktor Audio 2).

- The ALSA library and utilities also have many changes for the 1.0.25 release.

The official release announcement of ALSA 1.0.25 is very short on the mailing list.