The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) project is used to implement sound card drivers in Linux. Apart from the Kernel API, ALSA also provides a library API exposing the same functionality as the Kernel API but with a simpler and more usable interface. In this post, we will explore how the PCM Interface can be used for sound playback. There are quite a few options for dealing with audio on Linux. On one hand, we have high level libraries such as SDL or OpenAL that allow us to play a sound with a few lines of code. Then we also have entire frameworks devoted to multimedia such as GStreamer.