ALSA 1.0.24 Has Arrived, Bringing Better Linux Audio

ALSA 1.0.23 was released in April 2010 as a major update to the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, but it's finally been outdone by ALSA 1.0.24. The ALSA 1.0.24 update is also very significant and delivers on quite a number of sound card / audio processor driver improvements.

When looking over the 1.0.24 change-log at ALSA-Project.org, a number of changes stick out.

To the C-Media CMI8788 driver, which is used by a number of high-end sound cards, there is now support for the Xonar HDAV1.3 Slim, Xonar DG, X-Meridian 2G, Kuroutoshikou CMI8787-HG2PCI, and a number of other PCI IDs for different audio adapters. The HiFier driver has also been moved into this driver named snd-oxygen.

While there is finally a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi ALSA dirver, in ALSA 1.0.24 there's only a single change of little importance.

The HDA codec driver has a number of fixes, support for new adapters (including ALSA support in the new Apple MacBook Air computers and line-in support for the MacBookPro 5,3), and other minor improvements. All HDMI audio modules have also been merged into a single, unified HDMI module. There's plenty of ALSA HDA changes in this release. The HDA Intel driver in this release adds support for the VMware controller and has a number of other fixes too.