May 20, 2009, 6:41 pm
On our normal pc, after proper configuration, all audio streams will go into PulseAudio, so PA has only one kind of audio stream pa_stream, and PA is capable of controlling all audio streams. This is true on most of the platforms. But on some specific platforms, this might not be true. Intel Moorestown platform introduces an audio low power engine which could directly decode encoded audio streams say Mp3,AAC. But when encoded audio stream is sent into the low power engine, it never comes out, it is decoded and directly rendered to sound card. So, this kind of audio stream bypasses PulseAudio, thus PA is not capable of controlling it.
This is one of the reason why we need AudioManager, AM is capable of managing any kind of audio stream on any kind of platform as long as a specific module for that platform is implemented. This blog will take Moorestown platform as example…
